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Brian van Alebeek (2018)Master thesis. Nijmegen: Radboud University.Abstract. This study explores the factors and contexts behind food waste generation within food supply chains, and comes with suggestions for the role of intermediary organisations to promote supply chain coordination and innovation. The study builds upon Supply Chain Management (SCM) approaches and connects them with strands of Convention Theory, Global Value Chains, and concepts of power and responsibility. The empirical data is obtained using a sequential mixed methods design, including a survey and interviews with SMEs in the agriculture and food sector. The research focuses specifically on intermediary organisation Food Waste Xperts, which operates from the Dutch town of Veghel. The study concludes that food waste innovation in existing food supply chains is difficult to achieve, due to high degrees of specialisation and efficiency, which render adaptations complex and costly. Besides, companies appear to take little responsibility for the contribution of their business operations to food waste generation in other segments of the supply chain. Therefore, intermediaries have a critical role in addressing individual firms’ problems, as well as in advancing systemic approaches to innovation, in order to identify common interests and leverage points among supply chain partners. They also play a role in connecting niche markets to mainstream developments.“This research builds upon the work of two major strands in food-related research. On the side of supply chain collaboration and innovation, attention is given to modes of cooperation and coordination along the supply chain. These relationships are interpreted on the basis of Supply Chain Management approaches, and specifically look how supply chains are dynamically constituted, subsequently producing certain relations of power and responsibility among agents. On the side of routinised practices, recent development in the field of Convention theory are employed to analyse supply chain interactions. From this perspective, certain agreements and regularities emerge in supply chains over time, which relates to matters of power and responsibility on the side of supply chain management. However, these regularities in economic action are justified by making references to specific ‘orders of worth’, as they have been described in the work of French sociologists Laurent Thévenot and Luc Boltanski (Thévenot et al., 2000; Boltanski &#38; Thévenot, 2006 [1991]). The orders of worth can also be used to analyse the urgency in companies to reduce food waste, as well as to assess whether or not reduction strategies will be accepted by other companies relatively easily. The orders of worth are also related to the literature on Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), which also appeal to food waste mitigation. The question is, however, whether food waste reduction is really something that can only be addressed in alterity, or if there are also feasible leverage points to incorporate food waste reduction in conventional food systems. Furthermore, both theories were approached from a relational perspective, which means that network and supply chain relations were not conceived as being stable and fixed entities, but rather they are dynamic and constantly (re)constructed in relation with a wide variety of actors.”Download the thesis