The objective of the collaboration is to increase the knowledge about the grocery industry, particularly through generating new research on empirical issues related to grocery economics, eg., on topics like consumer behavior, market structure, competition and productivity.

RESEARCH TOPICS

FOOD aims to initiate research on topics such as:

• How do we understand new developments in grocery markets both internationally and nationally?
• How are local- and national competition affected by changes in the competitive framework?
• How to understand grocery pricing and -consumer behavior when the economy changes due to economic shocks and regulatory changes?
• How have competition and market structure affected the development in productivity, innovation and margins in the grocery industry?
• How is the grocery industry adapting to new sustainability concerns and changes in logistics and technology?
• How is the grocery industry affected by the new technology in terms of digitalization and new increased data availability?

AIMS

Through its research, FOOD aims to increase the attention on the grocery market both in the research community and in the public domain.

FOOD aims to achieve its goals through several channels:

• By initiating and publishing new research both nationally and internationally
• By initiating master thesis work on relevant topics
• By increasing the focus on grocery markets for NHH students
• By writing articles and op-eds and take part in the public debate
• By producing biweekly news-feeds on the grocery industry on its homepage
• By organizing conferences and workshops where researchers and industry people meet

FOOD consists of a team of people who are fully or partly devoted to the project. Several professors, PhD candidates and industry people are involved in the project.

FOOD organizes a large annual conference in Oslo each spring in March, where representatives of the industry and researchers meet to share and listen to both academic research and central industry people’s experiences. The conference gather 2-300 participants from the industry, academia and regulators.

Through the collaboration with NG, FOOD will initiate and finance smaller research projects on the grocery market. In particular, it initiates and finances a number of master theses on research topics covered by the FOOD project. Public versions of master theses, reports and research papers will be freely accessible on the FOOD homepage.  Op-eds and smaller articles on the grocery market, both with a local and an international focus are published on a regular basis on the homepage.

Documents

The contract documents are in Norwegian.

Research project agreement between NHH and NorgesGruppen (PDF 1,1 mb)