How to Assess Digitisation Impacts on the Food Industry: The Dutch Case of Microdata Collection for Firms’ Sustainability

Digital innovations can increase resilience and sustainability of food businesses due to for instance increasing efficiency, reducing pollution or improving transparency about production conditions. However, much of the research on this topic has been done at the primary production level, i.e. on technology impacts on farms, or remains at an ex-ante case study level when looking at digital technology impacts in downstream food businesses. Therefore, ex-post impacts of digital technologies after their adoption are largely unknown.

We here argue that this knowledge gap arises from the fact that we lack single company data (i.e. micro-data) on the adoption of digital technologies in food businesses. Only with this information can actual impacts of these technologies be assessed using causal inference methods. As a way forward, we highlight a unique dataset of digital technology adoption among Dutch downstream food businesses that is available for research purposes. We show that digital technologies already have a considerable market penetration in the Netherlands. Therefore, we urge the scientific community and governmental statistical offices to collect and make available similar data globally and make use of the already existing data. Such impact assessments will inform and accelerate the transition towards more sustainable and resilient food value chains.