A Framework to Understand Local Food Shopping: Towards a New Definition of the Multichannel Shopper Journey: An Abstract

82% of French people buy local food products and 59% of them at least once a week (Hérault-Fournier et al. 2020). While supermarkets remain the main place to buy local products, markets, convenience stores and specialty stores are very popular. More shoppers of local products are turning to digital channels, which were previously neglected. With the introduction of periods of containment (in France as in most countries), local food shopping journeys were disrupted with a strong adoption of pickup stores and home delivery (Chabault 2020). Existing theoretical frameworks have difficulties in understanding the complexity of food shopping journeys, focusing on a particular angle of approach, motivations or shopping orientations (Michaud-Trévinal and Héralt-Fournier 2018). Cervellon et al. (2015) called for the use of Theory of Practice (TP) developed by (Reckwitz 2002; Schatzki 1996) in order to extend the understanding of the multichannel shopping journey. We answer this call by using TP to propose a new framework for the shopper journey and we make an additional contribution to the literature by combining TP with situation theory. Following Schatzki et al (2001) and Warde (2005), the analysis of food shopping journeys focuses on the practical activity and its representations. We examine the ways in which local food shopping practice, shaped by bodies, minds, things, knowledges, discourses, and structures (Reckwitz 2002). Our resulting framework focuses not on consumers but on activities, competences, literacy and tools, that are embedded in a particular situation. Our research questions are: (1) To develop a new framework for local food shopping; (2) To propose a practice-based typology of local food shopping journeys. The methodology implemented meets the requirements of theory of practice by focusing data collection on acting and saying: a convenience sampling of 21 French shoppers was employed. The use of the narrative technique allows shopping stories to be collected. Full results and discussion will be presented at the conference.