EU School Fruit Scheme: Strengthening Local Businesses

Abstract

The EU School Fruit Scheme (SFS) provides children with fruits and vegetables (F&V), aiming to promote consumption of F&V among European school children. In addition, another objective of the program is to stabilize the fruit and vegetable market in the EU. The program varies between EU countries and with respect to some countries, e.g. Germany, even between the different federal states involved. This paper will concentrate on the specific situation in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany.
Our research therefore aims to map and analyze the situation of companies involved in the SFS in NRW, to reveal the social and economic driving forces for those companies to get engaged in the SFS, identify the networks that have developed as well as the factors that lead to success for those companies. For this purpose quantitative data of commodity flows of delivered goods and the logistics are combined with case studies gained from qualitative Interviews.
The results show, that companies involved in the school fruit scheme range from small farms and one man retail businesses to large multinational retail companies. According to our findings especially small and medium sized enterprises (SME) benefit from the SFS in NRW. In urban areas some firms have developed relationships with more than 30 schools leading to high turnover for these companies from their engagement in the SFS. Generally supply relationships vary in economical characteristics (variety, product value, origin) as well as in social attributes (motivation, social embedding).