Societal Transformation Through Social Entrepreneurial Action Research

Abstract

As communities experience social problems that negatively impact residents’ health and well-being, there is a growing need for unique, innovative solutions to address them. Researchers are increasingly studying social problems, especially those that require localized solutions. This article introduces Social Entrepreneurial Action Research (SEAR), a research process that uses social enterprises to advance an iterative cycle of research insights leading to business innovations. SEAR is driven by community stakeholders, grounded in research, and focused on ongoing societal transformation. This article describes the SEAR process and its theoretical foundation and demonstrates its application using a case study that provides illustrative examples from a social enterprise as it went through the stages of the process. SEAR is a method that can be used to address social problems with localized solutions that are community-based and long-lasting, and that result in societal transformation.

Keywords

Social Entrepreneurial Action Research social entrepreneurship spatial inequality stakeholder engagement societal impact community-based research food well-being

The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides “a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet” and establishes 17 Sustainable Development Goals that range from ending poverty and hunger to improving health and education to tackling climate change (https://sdgs.un.org/goals). While the goals focus on addressing challenges that affect individuals across the world, many cannot be solved without localized solutions. Extensive localized social problems impact local equity and are complex enough to require the development of local expertise and capabilities in order to address them. These social problems can include disparities related to local food environments; exposure to pollutants and environmental hazards; and access to community parks and playgrounds, childcare and schools, jobs, transportation, and other local infrastructure (Schulz and Northridge 2004).

Extensive localized social problems can create opportunities for research, practice, policy, and interventions to effect change, promote local health (Minkler 2005), and drive positive societal impact. Prior research has provided guidance on how researchers can establish partnerships with key stakeholders working to solve the challenges of interest (Bublitz et al. 2022; Ozanne, Davis, and Ekpo 2022) and how to conduct research that addresses extensive localized social problems with a community-based approach that acknowledges the importance of community stakeholders in understanding the challenges and developing solutions (Ozanne and Anderson 2010). Extensive localized social problems also provide opportunities for innovative business models and approaches to be created in collaboration with key stakeholders through the development of research-based social enterprises, or hybrid organizations with a dual mission that includes market or economic objectives alongside social objectives (Saebi, Foss, and Linder 2019). What is missing in the literature is a process for embedding research into the social entrepreneurial process that can be used to address complex, localized challenges.

In this article, we introduce Social Entrepreneurial Action Research (SEAR), a process that uses social enterprises to advance an iterative cycle of research insights leading to business innovations that are driven by community stakeholders, grounded in research, and focused on ongoing societal transformation. We describe the SEAR process and its theoretical foundation and illustrate its application using a case study that provides illustrative examples from a social enterprise as it went through the stages of the process. The case study demonstrates that SEAR can lead to societal transformation through an ongoing research cycle aimed at improving the daily lives of residents living in the communities served.

Extensive Localized Social Problems

Extensive localized social problems, often precipitated by social stigmas (Keene and Padilla 2014), are fundamentally complex, perpetuate inequities, and result in disparities (Schulz and Northridge 2004). Increasingly, marketing researchers are becoming interested in studying extensive localized social problems. For example, low-income and historically marginalized communities have limited access to retailers with fresh and healthy food (Beaulac, Kristjansson, and Cummins 2009; Lowery et al. 2016; Walker, Keane, and Burke 2010) due to nonrandom patterns of inequality that result from policies that extensively localize segregation through discriminatory housing policies and intentional decisions to locate unhealthy food options in ethnically and racially minoritized neighborhoods (Li and Yuan 2022; Shannon 2021). In marketing and central to our research, the food well-being paradigm (Block et al. 2011, p. 6)—“defined as a positive psychological, physical, emotional, and social relationship with food at both individual and societal levels”—establishes a research domain focused on local communities’ experiences with food, including hunger, and food well-being that provides clear directions for research (Bublitz et al. 2019).

Research on extensive localized social problems requires greater commitment and investment by the researcher to the community in need, including skills in building teams, resolving conflict, tolerating different perspectives, and respecting local expertise over a long-range time horizon (Ozanne, Davis, and Ekpo 2022). Despite a history of research inclusive of community knowledge and expertise, continued vigilance is needed to ensure that solutions focus on the potential for local knowledge to address and formulate solutions to neighborhood risks (Corburn 2005). Even today, there remains a tendency to elevate expert-driven conceptions of risk and local problems that often position the expertise of local residents, in the form of stories about their experiences and knowledge about their community, as less important to solution and policy formulation. In many cases, expert-driven conceptions also forgo local policy-making processes in favor of more top-down approaches that focus on state- or federal-level initiatives, despite the potential for municipal policies to also influence resource access and risk exposure within neighborhoods.

Prior research in marketing and related fields has provided guidance on how to conduct community-based research (e.g., Ozanne and Anderson 2010) and how to develop research partnerships with social impact organizations like nonprofits, local government entities, and socially focused organizations serving the community (Bublitz et al. 2022). It has introduced a typology of relational engagements that encourages researchers to partner with stakeholders such as policy makers, nonprofit organizations, business leaders, and consumer groups and defined different pathways for researchers to do so. Relational engagements are key to conducting research that can have a societal impact and can contribute to “the creation of the research, the awareness of the findings, the use of the research, and the potential societal benefit of the research” (Ozanne, Davis, and Ekpo 2022, p. 2).

The importance of relational engagements cannot be understated when studying extensive localized social problems. While scholars address pressing societal issues through scholarship, we propose that they can take their research efforts a step further by becoming social entrepreneurs themselves. Social entrepreneurs, like commercial entrepreneurs, identify opportunities to create new ventures or manage existing organizations in an innovative manner but are distinct in that they identify opportunities that are based on societal problems (Saebi, Foss, and Linder 2019). Next, we introduce SEAR, an approach to developing research-based social enterprises driven by community stakeholders and focused on ongoing societal transformation.

Social Entrepreneurial Action Research

Social Entrepreneurial Action Research (SEAR) draws on and combines concepts from the social entrepreneurship literature (Gupta et al. 2019) and the process of developing social enterprises (Saebi, Foss, and Linder 2019) with community action research (CAR; Ozanne and Anderson 2010), which provides an approach to conducting community-based research. The SEAR process is an entrepreneurship-oriented extension of CAR that addresses extensive localized social problems that need ongoing research-informed interventions. SEAR innovates the CAR process, extending it to include the formation of a social enterprise with a dual mission of social value and economic value and prescribing a cyclical research process with the aim of socially and economically transforming the communities served. Central to SEAR is research collaboration at the intersection of public, private, and nonprofit community stakeholders characterized by entrepreneurial bricolage, or making do with the local community resources available to the researcher, to spur societal and economic transformation (Alkire et al. 2020; Liu et al. 2021).

The social entrepreneurial phenomenon suggests that social entrepreneurs identify societal problems that can be addressed by social enterprises, then collaborate with partners (i.e., stakeholders) who bring the capabilities needed to form social enterprises that can resolve the problem, resulting in societal transformation (Saebi, Foss, and Linder 2019). Building on this, the SEAR process consists of three research stages that social entrepreneurial scholars traverse: identifying the societal problem, developing and implementing the social enterprise, and contributing to societal transformation, which is measured with the community as the unit of analysis (Ozanne and Anderson 2010). Further, SEAR proposes that development and implementation of the research-based social enterprise and societal transformation could result in the identification of new societal problems, which the social enterprise may choose to address or which may require a new research-based entrepreneurial solution, creating a cyclical opportunity to enact social change.

Social entrepreneurial research intentions, distinct from purely social or entrepreneurial intentions, are shaped by direct collaboration with community members. This collaboration increases entrepreneurial empathy and understanding of social problems and the drive to achieve community objectives, such as well-being (Gupta et al. 2019). The involvement of community members and stakeholders in the research process is key to the CAR process (Ozanne and Anderson 2010). Consistent with CAR, SEAR places community stakeholders at the center of the proposed research process, which includes the following steps in each stage of the social entrepreneurial cycle: problem identification, data collection, and analysis and reporting. The research process is iterative, such that research conducted during each step can inform the research process in other steps. Embedding the research process into the social entrepreneurial cycle can result in greater societal impact, better business practices due to data-driven decision making, and contributions to theory development and the academic literature. See Figure 1 for the SEAR process.

Figure 1.

The Social Entrepreneurial Action Research Process.

An extension of CAR, SEAR is managerially informed, incorporating commercial research themes through an entrepreneurial orientation. The conflicting missions of social enterprises represent a critical force that influences the SEAR process (Saebi, Foss, and Linder 2019). As a hybrid organization (social and economic dual bottom line), the social enterprise must balance prioritization of social and economic value for problem identification, data collection, and analysis and reporting (Zahra et al. 2009). For example, a social enterprise conducting research on community access to healthy food must define the societal problem not only in terms of food well-being but also in terms of the development of viable businesses that sell healthy food in the community. In addition, the SEAR process is marked by bricolage in the decision making of the social enterprise. Entrepreneurial bricolage is a resource conservation strategy that emphasizes resource transformation and reconfiguration (Liu et al. 2021). The SEAR process is enacted through collaboration with community stakeholders to identify how the social enterprise can make do with unused or unwanted local resources. For example, bricolage can play a role in the formation and operation of the social enterprise by partnering with community members to identify ways in which to creatively access office space, equipment, and personnel. Importantly, bricolage is key to cultivating a culture of research innovation that enhances entrepreneurial ambitions and motivations to achieve greater social impact scaling (Liu et al. 2021). For example, the patchwork of strategic alliances that evolve during the research process can reveal greater societal needs that the social enterprise can address in subsequent iterations of the research cycle.

Case Study: BrightSide Produce

To illustrate the SEAR process, we present BrightSide Produce (www.brightside.sdsu.edu; BrightSide hereinafter), a social enterprise operating in San Diego County that was cofounded by an academic researcher and a retired food retailing executive, as a case study. BrightSide was founded in 2017 as a produce distribution service that aims to increase healthy food access in underserved communities through produce distribution to local food retailers. It delivers produce to independently owned small markets and liquor, corner, and convenience stores that accept payments from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and are located in underserved and minoritized communities. BrightSide partners with over 50 government, for-profit, and nonprofit partners to maximize its impact on the communities served.

BrightSide explores an extensive localized social problem, limited access to healthy food in underserved communities, which has a direct impact on the health and well-being of local residents given that the sources of food available in a community influence dietary behaviors (Caspi et al. 2012). The community food environment, particularly a lack of access to healthy food, in low-income and marginalized communities can contribute to unhealthy eating and household food insecurity (Glanz et al. 2005; Seligman, Laraia, and Kushel 2010). Repeated studies across a variety of neighborhood contexts have found that communities with higher proportions of low-income and historically marginalized residents have limited access to healthy food outlets such as supermarkets; farmers’ markets; and retailers with fresh produce, lean meats, dairy products, and dried goods (Beaulac, Kristjansson, and Cummins 2009; Lowery et al. 2016; Walker, Keane, and Burke 2010) and greater access to liquor, corner, and convenience stores relative to wealthier, predominantly White neighborhoods (D’Angelo et al. 2011; Gittelsohn et al. 2008; Larson, Story, and Nelson 2009; Morland, Wing, and Diez Roux 2002; Sloane et al. 2003; Zenk et al. 2006).

Poor quality community food environments are not random, nor are they the result of pure market forces (Li and Yuan 2022). These patterns of spatial inequality, or unequal geographic access, are instead the long-term results of policies that segregated communities through redlining, discriminatory housing policies, and repeated intentional decisions to locate unhealthy food options in neighborhoods of color (Havewala 2021; Li and Yuan 2022; Shannon 2021). While encouraging supermarkets to place stores in underserved communities has often been seen as the solution for increasing healthy food access, this approach is not always feasible (Pothukuchi 2005). New supermarket store openings can struggle to launch or be short-lived, and may not serve local customers with the right products or affordable offerings (Engler-Stringer et al. 2019; Freedman et al. 2021). In addition, store failures can further exacerbate notions that expanding healthy food access in these neighborhoods is not possible. Land use regulations, market limitations, and property value depreciation may further limit opportunities to build supermarkets. Creating public policies to regulate supermarket locations remains challenging, as engagement with residents and stakeholders is critical for promoting equity, but the siting of larger markets is frequently led by private developers focused on profit (Pothukuchi 2005). As a result, residents in underserved communities face geographic and economic barriers to acquiring fresh foods supportive of a healthy diet. Next, we present an illustrative example of SEAR as navigated by BrightSide.

Societal Problem

The societal problem that BrightSide identified is spatial inequality in healthy food access in an underserved community as a result of a lack of or limited access to retailers, such as supermarkets, that offer healthy food options and greater access to small markets and liquor, corner, and convenience stores that have limited healthy food options available. The impetus for starting BrightSide was a series of conversations with community stakeholders regarding the current food landscape in National City, California, a city in San Diego County. The cofounders were aware of the broader impacts of limited healthy food access, but in 2014 they had the opportunity to interview the owner of a small market located in a neighborhood without access to a supermarket about the challenges he was facing trying to offer fresh produce in his store. To fully understand the societal problem within the community, BrightSide engaged in a research process with multiple stakeholder groups.

Identifying spatial inequality in healthy food access

In San Diego County, unhealthy eating, along with sedentary lifestyle and tobacco use, contributes to four serious chronic diseases (cancer, heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes, and lung disease) that account for over 45% of all deaths (San Diego REACH 2019). In 2022, household food insecurity was estimated to affect approximately one in four (28%) San Diego residents (San Diego Hunger Coalition 2022). Many residents have limited healthy food access, with some census tracts classified as food deserts and food swamps (Rose et al. 2009; see also https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas/), or areas with an abundance of retailers carrying unhealthy, rather than healthy, food.

The countywide issues associated with food inequity are acutely felt in National City, a small municipality that covers 9.12 square miles in the South Bay area of the San Diego metropolitan region. The median household income in National City is $36,032—40% lower than the countywide median. The majority of residents are members of non-White populations. Over 50% of households have housing costs at 30% or more of their income and are rent burdened, and around 20% of households participate in SNAP.¹ National City has the lowest automobile ownership rate in San Diego County and, as a result, many residents rely on walking, carpooling, and public transportation (San Diego County 2020). Therefore, National City residents face a number of challenges, including limited healthy food access.

To determine what approaches could be taken to improve the community food environment in National City, BrightSide engaged multiple community stakeholders in an iterative data collection process and conducted secondary research to determine what had been tried in other communities and what the academic literature in public health, nutrition, and related fields had investigated. The data collection process was inherently complicated, so we attempt to provide a coherent summary in the following subsections.

Substantiating the need for food well-being and the role of existing food retailers

Data from community stakeholders confirmed the findings of secondary research, which revealed that the community could benefit from increased healthy food access. Community residents asked county and city government and nonprofit organizations to prioritize increasing healthy food access, established community gardens and urban farms to grow food in the community, and developed nutrition education and healthy cooking and eating expertise to support community education (e.g., Olivewood Gardens and Learning Center [https://www.olivewoodgardens.org]). Consistent with these efforts, food environment assessments found rising demand for fresh and healthy foods, an active and engaged community, and existing initiatives focused on growing produce and conducting educational outreach (Joassart-Marcelli, Bosco, and Delgado 2014; Kling and Castro 2017). In addition, when a National City nutrition education nonprofit asked participants to share a key barrier to implementing what they learned, participants responded that they did not have access to fresh produce in the stores near their homes. This information confirmed that community residents wanted to see an increase in healthy food access.

Through interviews with city and county staff, BrightSide found that both wanted to increase healthy food access and had official documents stating that this was a priority. At the county level, in 2019 the County of San Diego developed a State of the Food System Report for the San Diego Region, engaging dozens of stakeholders and local organizations involved in the San Diego food system. The county strongly encourages “pursu[ing] opportunities to address food deserts by building on existing resources and supporting small stores through financial, marketing and technical assistance” (County of San Diego 2019, p. xxii). In addition, the county stated that improving nutrition by increasing access to healthy foods is a strategy to improve “health, prevent chronic diseases, and reduce health disparities among racial and ethnic populations with the highest risk of chronic disease” (San Diego REACH 2019). At the city level, National City stated in its General Plan that it prioritizes “convenient access to fresh and healthy foods, water, fruits, and vegetables for all segments of the community” (City of National City 2011). National City also developed a set of policies around these goals. Land Use Policy 5.2 encourages the development of, and access to, “healthy food supplies … especially in areas where a healthy food supply … is not located within a half to quarter mile away” (City of National City 2011). Therefore, both the county and the city wanted to increase access to healthy food, and produce specifically, and considered existing stores in the community as potential outlets to do so.

This is consistent with what was found in the literature—that existing independently owned food businesses, such as corner and convenience stores and small markets, that are already serving community residents can serve as an important source of healthy food access. Taking a community asset–based approach shifts the focus away from encouraging new business entrants toward leveraging existing stores that already serve residents. The introduction of healthy food items into these stores that traditionally carry prepared foods, high-calorie foods and drinks, liquor, and beer provides an opportunity to use existing local assets to increase the visibility and variety of nutritious foods within the community (Caspi et al. 2017b). In many neighborhoods, proximity to these stores makes them an appealing choice for local residents looking for healthy food (Caspi et al. 2017a), particularly among individuals and families experiencing food insecurity (Lenk et al. 2020). Prior research on the effects of introducing healthy food items into these stores (e.g., corner store interventions) has found that stocking healthy food items can impact consumer perceptions (Cavanaugh et al. 2014; Paluta et al. 2019), but it has yielded mixed findings related to changes in purchasing and consumption behaviors (Jernigan et al. 2019; Albert et al. 2017; Gittelsohn et al. 2010). Mixed findings reported in the research may be due to several factors, including the outcomes measured, product factors such as not carrying the right products (e.g., culturally appropriate items) or lack of affordable prices, limited consumer awareness about the availability of healthy options in the stores, or barriers to stocking healthy items that limit store owners’ capacity to consistently provide these products.

Prior research revealed that store owners face a number of market barriers when attempting to carry healthy products in their stores, which limits their ability to provide healthier food options. Economic challenges preventing store owners from carrying fresh food items include lack of access to distributors that service small stores, limited experience with product categories, problems with existing store infrastructure, financial risks associated with perishable food, and uncertain consumer demand (Gittelsohn et al. 2014; O’Malley et al. 2013; Powell et al. 2019). Smaller stores are often unable to order in quantities required by traditional distributors, resulting in a limited selection of merchandise, with few perishable options and higher prices (Caspi et al. 2016). Store owners may also be reluctant to replace profitable shelf-stable snacks and beverages with perishable items such as produce, because doing so may cut into the financial sustainability of their business (Bodor et al. 2010; Gittelsohn et al. 2008; Jetter and Cassady 2010; McDaniel et al. 2018). These barriers were confirmed as the key challenges faced by store owners that BrightSide interviewed.

As a result of this process, BrightSide learned that it could offer social value to community members who were actively advocating for increased healthy food access in the community. Although the community had a limited number of supermarkets, economic value could be generated through the liquor, corner, and convenience stores serving as food retailers for residents, as these stores were willing to carry healthy product options but faced market challenges offering healthier products in the stores.

Developing and launching the social enterprise distribution model

The development of the social enterprise distribution model was driven by community stakeholder engagement in the research analysis and reporting process to understand and address the societal problem. An important finding that emerged from analyzing the societal problem, and a contribution of the work that BrightSide does, is the identification of the central role of independently owned small retailers as key stakeholders in defining the localized extensive social problem of healthy food accessibility and contributing to the solution. Prior research focused on improving healthy food access acknowledges the importance of small markets, corner stores, and convenience stores, but liquor stores have not been considered. In many underserved communities, as is the case in National City, there are more liquor stores than other store types. Liquor stores are understudied in existing research and often excluded from participation in government programs that provide technical assistance due to their focus on alcoholic beverages. Given their prevalence in underserved communities and their commitment to serving low-income consumers by offering food items and accepting food assistance payments, their inclusion is consistent with using an asset-based approach that leverages existing stores in the community. Partnering with small markets, corner and convenience stores, and liquor stores was a direct way of increasing access to fresh produce, making it accessible for community residents in their neighborhoods and near their homes.

Based on prior research and store owner involvement, BrightSide developed a distribution model that directly addresses the challenges that prevent store owners from successfully carrying fresh produce. BrightSide's conflicting missions—National City healthy food access and store healthy food sales—represented a unique aspect of the social enterprise that created tensions that needed to be considered in the research process and plan of action (Gupta et al. 2019; Saebi, Foss, and Linder 2019). A key challenge was identifying and resolving operational aspects of the enterprise aimed at improving healthy food access that resulted in reduced profit margins across the distribution channel and discouraged store owners from participating in the program. While it appeared that the delivery component (getting produce to the stores, distributing fresh produce weekly, and offering low costs without minimum order requirements) and the infrastructure component (providing fixtures and baskets) were the key barriers that needed to be addressed, store owners communicated that they needed more support to successfully offer produce to customers. BrightSide had to provide additional services to store owners for free, including selecting what produce items should be carried; managing inventory; ordering, delivering, merchandising, and stocking products; recommending prices; and offering any additional support needed by the store owners (e.g., marketing support, consumer education). Further, store owners were concerned about the financial risk of carrying produce due to its perishability. BrightSide developed a buyback program for unsold produce that reimbursed store owners for items that did not sell and were no longer sellable, further reducing the financial risk of stocking produce for the store owners by shifting it to BrightSide.

While all of these services increased the likelihood of the store successfully offering produce to the community (social objective), they created tension between the financial success of the stores and increased costs to BrightSide (economic objective). These additional services increased the amount of BrightSide staff time spent preparing for deliveries, the number of staff members needed for deliveries, and the amount of time spent during the delivery process at each store. Resolving the tension between social and economic objectives, BrightSide moved forward with providing all of these services to store owners but reduced the number of planned store partners.

SEAR leads to a deeper understanding of the societal problem

The SEAR process revealed the societal problem to be spatially inequitable access to healthy food options. The problem was not only deeply embedded in the community but also beyond community members’ control to resolve. Government entities could not legislate an environment to attract or sustain investment, community members could not reliably produce for themselves or others, and existing stores could not justify the product assortment or margins and could not find a distributor that offered the products. The key inference from the research process was the need for a social enterprise to address spatial inequality in healthy food access in the community. This is unlike other research in marketing, as the social enterprise goes beyond relational engagements such as organizational partnerships, community building, or commercialization (Ozanne, Davis, and Ekpo 2022) to create an innovation-based venture with dual social and economic missions. SEAR also differs from research in social entrepreneurship by embedding the research process as the action-formation mechanism that drives the development of the social enterprise's economic and social objectives (Saebi, Foss, and Linder 2019).

Social Enterprise

BrightSide launched in 2017 (three years after first being introduced to the societal problem), providing produce distribution services to five stores in National City. This small store set allowed BrightSide to adjust its service offerings as needed and to engage with community stakeholders more deeply. Ongoing weekly check-ins with store owners suggested adjustments to the services offered that were implemented before expansion, such as increasing the variety of items offered to include culturally appropriate options and tailoring the variety based on the type of store being served, resulting in additional staff time investments for BrightSide. During the launch period, the cofounders also engaged with community members, local nonprofits, and city and county staff. BrightSide staff attended neighborhood meetings to share information about the organization and its partner stores with community residents, reached out to local nonprofit organizations working on food access challenges to provide information and conduct presentations for their staff, met with city and county staff to provide information about the services that were being provided, and presented at a City Council meeting to inform community members and city government officials.

The buyback program operation challenge

Early in the implementation process, a key challenge to the BrightSide business model was identified. It became clear that initial produce sales would be lower than anticipated and that the category would not experience growth for an extended period of time. In retrospect, this should not have been surprising, given that most of the stores that BrightSide partnered with did not offer fresh produce prior to the introduction of BrightSide's services. BrightSide had to invest in additional marketing materials and reevaluate store sales projections while managing store owner expectations, reassuring store owners that sales would increase over time. The slower sales intensified the cost of offering the buyback program (reimbursing store owners for unsellable or spoiled produce) and providing marketing support to stores. Produce had to be available in the stores for customers but, even with limited quantities available at stores, the buyback costs were much higher than expected. Given the importance of the buyback program to store owners, scaling it back was not an option. BrightSide had to innovate the buyback program to ensure that produce was available in stores.

Tracking store sales and food waste

Weekly data collection during deliveries as part of BrightSide's weekly operations captured the product quantities per produce item and costs associated with the buyback program at each partner store, and conversations with store owners provided additional insights into customer preferences. Using the data available, and with the goal of reducing buyback costs without decreasing variety in stores or increasing the risk of stockouts, the BrightSide team developed a weekly procedure for projecting sales per item per store that considered previous weeks’ sales and buybacks, as well as seasonality. Once implemented, this weekly procedure offered benefits beyond reducing buybacks by more closely monitoring changes in demand across products in each store. It also provided more accurate estimates of what was needed each week per item across all stores so purchased quantities resulted in fewer produce items spoiling both in stores and at the BrightSide warehouse. Even with these adjustments, the data showed that it was not realistic to expect buybacks to be reduced to zero. Data collection also revealed that in addition to spoiled produce, buyback produce included produce that was still edible but not sellable, contributing to a different societal problem, food waste.

Defraying buyback costs and food waste burdens

In the United States, 30%–40% of food is wasted (https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs), and BrightSide did not want to contribute to this societal problem. BrightSide engaged with its network of stakeholders to analyze and make them aware of the negative impacts of the buyback program and the adjustments being made to the program, and to uncover a collaborative approach to prevent the buyback produce from ending up in landfills. Initially, BrightSide partnered with the chef at the kitchen where it warehoused its produce to provide some items that he could use. This led to finding an organization that provided cooking classes and was interested in receiving other items. As the number of store partners grew and the volume of produce increased, BrightSide partnered with a food bank in San Diego that connected BrightSide with a local community center that could accept all of the edible produce. For the produce that was spoiled, BrightSide found a partner that was willing to accept and compost the produce.

SEAR informs adjustments and identifies additional challenges and solutions

While the buyback program met the economic goals of the store owners and the social goal of ensuring that produce was available for the community, it came at an economic cost for BrightSide and a social cost by contributing to a different societal problem (linking the social enterprise back to a new societal problem), food waste. Typical of social entrepreneurial bricolage, innovations were generated adaptively making use of unused local resources to serve multiple and often disparate expectations and influences of collaborators (Gupta et al. 2019). Uniquely, the buyback food waste problem highlighted not just the economic impacts on BrightSide but also the economic exigency of stores (collaborators). Importantly, the data collection process and analysis leveraged the expertise of the cofounders, a food retail executive with expertise in addressing operational challenges and improving efficiency, and a researcher who developed data collection protocols and procedures so that the information needed to make data-driven decisions was readily available. In addition, this example illustrates the importance of community stakeholder connections and partnerships in BrightSide becoming a zero-food-waste operation.

Societal Transformation

After operating in National City for five years and offering produce distribution services to 13 stores, BrightSide evaluated whether it was achieving its aim of addressing the spatial inequality related to healthy food access. This required studying the impact of the introduction of its services into stores on community-level outcomes, including societal and economic transformations.

Improving multimodal access to healthy food

Access to healthy foods needs to be evaluated not only in terms of whether a location is available but also in terms of whether individuals have the ability to move between home and other important destinations, known as neighborhood mobility. Decisions about where to obtain food are guided by cultural, dietary, and taste preferences (Shannon 2016) and informed by available resources and time needed to shop (Coveney and O’Dwyer 2009; Jiao et al. 2012; Ledoux and Vojnovic 2013; Morland, Wing, and Diez Roux 2002). Where mobility is limited, decisions about where to obtain food are also limited. Ultimately, the interaction of these factors guides decisions about where to shop and influences the travel strategies of individuals and families as they seek out sources of food (Clifton 2004; Rose 2011; Shannon 2016). Therefore, multimodal access, which considers travel distances and times for travelers who use a variety of transportation modes (e.g., cars, walking, public transportation) to reach their destinations, is critical to healthy food access and a key community-level outcome for BrightSide (Swayne and Lowery 2021).

Travel mode, distance, time of day, and travel time to nearby food retail outlets are increasingly included in analyses to understand access via a variety of modes (Burns and Inglis 2007; Farber, Morang, and Widener 2014; Jiao et al. 2012; Raja, Ma, and Yadav 2008; Rose and Richards 2004; Russell and Heidkamp 2011; Swayne and Lowery 2021; Widener et al. 2013). Low-income and carless shoppers who rely on public transportation face additional time burdens associated with traveling to local stores; this may deepen the inequities of the food environment. Importantly, research and policies in this area often focus on spatial availability and walkable access to large-scale opportunities to purchase food, such as supermarkets (Swayne and Lowery 2021), rather than to small stores, such as small markets and corner and convenience stores. Studying the spatial impact of increasing healthy food options in these stores adds new insights into the potential to improve multimodal access to healthy food, taking an asset-based approach that leverages existing assets in the community to meet community needs. Therefore, data collection focused on addressing community-level transformation outcomes to capture the impact of BrightSide's services on spatial inequality to healthy food access in National City. These outcomes included changes to multimodal community member access to healthy food as a result of BrightSide partner stores successfully offering produce and the economic value of offering produce to community residents.

Uncovering community healthy food access transit patterns

We leveraged multiple data sources to study changes to multimodal access. First, we used a systematic web search to identify the location of supermarkets found in, or within one mile of, the National City municipal boundary. We verified addresses for national, regional, and full-service supermarkets from company websites. For other stores that do not maintain a database of store locations, we conducted web searches for “grocery store.” We used Google Earth and Google Street View to verify data gathered through this process (additional details on this data can be found in Swayne and Lowery [2021]). Store location data were exported as a Keyhole Markup Language (KML) file for visualization in ArcGIS Pro 2.8.

Data on existing transit service provision was taken from the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) online geographic information system (GIS) data warehouse. These data include information on public transit stops provided by the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS). MTS provides transit service across San Diego County and in National City. This includes 94 bus and trolley stops within the National City boundary. We downloaded the MTS data for the entire service area and removed transit stops outside of the National City municipal boundary.

Land use was determined using the SANDAG land use shapefile, which includes parcel-level information on how land is being used (e.g., residential, commercial, industrial). These data were downloaded from the SANDAG online GIS data warehouse. Each parcel is identified with a numeric land use code that corresponds with its use. We identified and isolated residential land uses and their associated codes located in National City, including multifamily residential units (1200), multifamily residential without units (1290), single family detached units (1110), single family multiple units (1120), single family residential without units (1190), single room occupancy units (1280), and mobile home parks (1300).

Census block groups (CBGs), the smallest spatial area for which the U.S. Census Bureau provides community level socioeconomic data, for National City (n = 52) were taken from U.S. Census TIGER/Line shapefiles. These shapefiles contain the legal boundaries for each CBG along with its unique geographic entity code (GEOID). We use these codes to match data on sociodemographics from the 2020 five-year U.S. American Community Survey (ACS) estimates. Sociodemographic data for each census block group were downloaded from the U.S. Census data portal (data.census.gov) for 2019. Indicators used in our analysis include median household income (B19013_001), percent owner and renter occupied households without a private vehicle (owner: S2504_B25044_003, renter: S2504_B25044_010), percent households experiencing poverty (B17026_C17002), percent household homeowner occupied (DP04_0046E), percent population identified as Black (DP05_0038EA), and percent population identified as Hispanic/Latino (DP05_0038EA).

To measure BrightSide's impact on residential areas in National City, we measure the percentage of residentially zoned parcels within quarter-mile walkable access to stores that offer produce. We mapped every supermarket and BrightSide partner store location in National City (n = 13). These points were used to generate quarter-mile walkable service area buffers around each store and served as food outlet destinations in the travel time analysis. To compare fresh produce access before and after the introduction of BrightSide's services, we first mapped the supermarket service areas in National City using a quarter-mile buffer. This buffer method serves to approximate the walkable land area around each store and provides a baseline measure of the healthy food service areas in National City. We further examine the pieces of land dedicated to residential land use (i.e., neighborhoods where people actually live) within these quarter mile buffers to delineate neighborhoods that previously lacked access to a healthy food outlet. In addition, we assessed economic transformation by evaluating sales of produce at partner stores, including increases in produce accessibility and availability as a result of the introduction of BrightSide's services.

Reducing healthy food spatial inequality and transforming the role of liquor, corner, and convenience stores

Within National City, there are 1,864 residential parcels covering a total land area of approximately 1,458 acres. Prior to the introduction of BrightSide's services, 606 (32.5%) of these parcels, covering 512 acres, had walkable quarter-mile access to fresh produce at one or more supermarkets (Figure 2, Panel A). The addition of the 13 BrightSide partner store locations expanded coverage to include a total of 1,320 (70.8%) parcels or 900 total acres, representing more than a 100% increase in the total residential area located within one quarter-mile of a fresh produce retailer (Figure 2, Panel B). BrightSide's services added walkable quarter-mile fresh produce access for an additional 714 residential lots covering 388 acres of National City.

Figure 2.

Quarter-Mile Walking Buffers Around Supermarkets (Panel A) and Around BrightSide Partner Store Locations (BSP Sites) Added to Existing Access (Panel B).

To calculate how the introduction of BrightSide's services to partner store locations impacted transit travel times to fresh produce outlets, we used the Google Distance Matrix API, the routing algorithm powering the mobile Google Maps application—the most widely used smartphone app for finding directions. This routing method is likely to be the same method a resident would use to check transit routes and schedules, as well as local road conditions. The Google Distance Matrix API routes travelers over the public transit and street network, calculating the most time-efficient path between a set of user-defined origins and destinations based on mode of transportation (e.g., a residential location and a supermarket by public transit).

We developed Python code to fetch transit and automobile travel times between origin points, CBG centers (i.e., centroids), and destination points (i.e., food retailers) using the Google Distance Matrix API. We simulated these trips at 5:00 p.m. on Friday, April 1, 2022, a peak travel time when public transit service is more frequent and roads may be more congested. To compare travel time differences before and after the introduction of BrightSide's services, we ran models using only the list of supermarkets located in National City and then reran the models integrating BrightSide partner store locations. Under both scenarios, we pair all CBGs with their ten nearest food outlets (measured as the crow flies) and use these as our origin–destination pairs. The Google Distance Matrix API outputs transit travel times for each CBG to its associated stores, before and after the introduction of BrightSide's services. In ArcGIS, we pair these CBG-level travel time data with sociodemographic data to better understand the impact of BrightSide's services on addressing spatial inequality in healthy food access.

Public transit travel times were reduced as a result of the introduction of BrightSide's services to partner store locations. Prior to the introduction of BrightSide's services, average minimum travel time via public transit to a food outlet was 12.07 minutes. The addition of BrightSide partner store locations reduced the average minimum travel time via public transit to 10.7 minutes for CBGs in National City. We found that 31% of CBGs (16 out of 52) saw transit travel time reductions (Figure 3), and 6 CBGs that previously lacked access to a store within a ten-minute transit commute gained access to at least one store. The CBGs with measurable reductions in transit travel time to healthy food retailers are home to an estimated 34,038 people (ACS 2020), representing over half of National City residents.

Figure 3.

Census Block Group Transit Travel Time Changes with BrightSide's Services to Partner Stores.

To understand sociodemographic differences between CBGs with measurable reductions in transit travel times and those without, we conducted Mann–Whitney nonparametric tests. Results suggest that the CBGs that experienced reduced public transit travel times to healthy food retailers had significantly higher poverty rates (U = 177.5, p < .05) and a greater number of Hispanic/Latino residents (U = 139.0, p < .01). Tests against other socioeconomic variables were not statistically significant (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Sociodemographic Characteristics of CBGs in National City That Experienced a Change in Transit Travel Time (vs. Those That Did Not) as a Result of the Introduction of BrightSide's Services to Partner Stores.

	CBGs with Transit Travel Time Reductions (N = 16)	CBGs Without Transit Travel Time Reductions (N = 36)	Mann–Whitney U
Median household income ($)	47,991	55,551	210.0
Mean % households with no vehicle	6.46	8.61	275.0
Mean % households below poverty	24.60	16.24	177.5*
Mean % homeowner occupied	37.69	47.77	226.0
Mean % Black	3.68	6.52	214.5
Mean % Hispanic	71.44	56.49	139.0**

*p < .05.

**p < .01.

Importantly, analyses and results suggest that BrightSide increased the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables in its partner stores. Prior to the introduction of BrightSide's services, overall produce availability (fruits and vegetables) at BrightSide partner stores ranged from 0 to 20 varieties. With the introduction of BrightSide's services, 100% of partner stores had produce available and carried between 6 and 27 varieties, with 62% of stores carrying over 14 different produce items. Average produce availability increased by over 300%, from 4 varieties to 17. Sales data suggest that produce sales increased year over year (except 2020) across store types. While liquor store mean annual sales were lower than those of small markets, liquor stores served as a source of healthy food access, with customers purchasing produce at these stores and the stores seeing increasing year-to-year mean annual sales.

The results of these analyses suggest that BrightSide reduced spatial inequality in healthy food access in National City, resulting in economic and societal transformation. The introduction of BrightSide's services to partner store locations in National City allowed both the county and the city to meet priorities and policy goals that had been stated but not addressed. These results allowed BrightSide to advocate for funding for its operations, which directly meet community needs and policy goals. BrightSide's cofounders have also been invited to help set the local agenda for improving equity in the food system. Results were shared with community members, local nonprofits, and other community stakeholders, including interdisciplinary researchers studying challenges related to healthy food access, food insecurity, and hunger.

BrightSide effectuated societal and economic transformation by reducing the community’s spatial inequality in healthy food access in multiple ways. First, the importance of local food retailers, which included liquor, corner, and convenience stores and small markets, became undeniable as they were transformed into reliable sources of affordable produce. Central to this impact is the transformational role of these small stores in supporting the health and wellness of the community. Liquor, corner, and convenience stores and small markets proved to be effective retail formats for the distribution of fruits and vegetables. As might be expected, markets generated greater sales of fruits and vegetables than liquor stores, but liquor stores also experienced increased sales levels of produce over time. Future research can identify ways to improve the impact of liquor stores on availability and identify other types of nonmarket retail store formats that can be vehicles for increasing the impact of produce availability and improving food well-being. Second, more community residents are now within walking or public transportation distance from a store offering fresh fruits and vegetables. This has a direct impact on the daily lives of thousands of community residents. The value of public transportation was enhanced for a significant proportion of community residents who gained access to stores that sold produce. Finally, these societal transformations were most impactful for members of the community with higher poverty rates and from minority backgrounds.

Takeaways and recommendations for policy

Approaches to improving the food system necessitate a variety of place-based and community-centered approaches that may not currently be part of municipal efforts to improve the local food system. Initial efforts to improve the accessibility and availability of healthy foods often focus on supermarkets, but the evolution of these policies is likely to involve more strategies that take into consideration the local regulatory context and land use constraints. Policies that support and promote the availability of fresh produce at existing small markets and convenience, corner, and liquor stores provide one approach for improving the ability of community members to access food more readily and quickly by walking and via public transit.

The results examining the impact of the introduction of BrightSide's services in National City, California, have important implications for policies where efforts to add brick-and-mortar supermarkets or transit routes are often met by onerous development processes, and in places where current land uses are more amenable to small-scale approaches to food systems planning. A variety of available food strategies should be part of the development, adoption, and enforcement of land use policies intended to improve community health. Municipalities are increasingly diversifying regulatory approaches to improving access to healthy food, including economic policies that subsidize specific types of food retail, land use policies that allow for urban agriculture on public land, and transportation plans that link residential neighborhoods to food by foot, bicycle, and public transportation (Cohen 2022). Public policies should rightfully be focused on attracting large-scale retail food outlets in some areas, but policies should also encourage farmers’ markets (Lowery et al. 2016), community agriculture (Horst, McClintock, and Hoey 2017), and mobile markets (Widener, Metcalf, and Bar-Yam 2012) to address food insecurity through physical and spatial planning.

Robust food policy goals were included in National City’s General Plan and developed and enacted by the municipality, setting the necessary groundwork for a social enterprise like BrightSide. BrightSide directly contributed to National City's policy goal of development of, and access to, “healthy food supplies … especially in areas where a healthy food supply … is not located within a half to quarter mile away” (LU Policy 5.2, City of National City 2011). Other cities and organizations looking to improve the community food environment can do so in part through similar planning and visioning centered on food equity (Mui et al. 2021).

Evidence suggests a variety of opportunities to build healthy food access through public policy in communities like National City. A recent survey of members of the American Planning Association, a professional organization of those who provide city councils with guidance about local land use regulation, found that while a majority (51%) of respondents had helped their local government address food access through regulations concerning grocery stores, far fewer responded that their municipality has policies that support healthy corner stores (20%), community-supported agriculture (22%), and mobile fresh food retail (16%) (Clark, Conley, and Raja 2021). Municipal agriculture ordinances and land use policy can both enable and support food retail that provides access to healthy food through regulations that diversify the land use mix of communities, so that food can coexist with other types of commercial development, and by regulating that mix to ensure that unhealthy food does not oversaturate a particular commercial district (Clark, Conley, and Raja 2021). The integration of food access into local land use regulation is often most effectively done through planned revisions of municipal policy, such as a comprehensive plan, but it can also be part of a communitywide organizing effort to address long-standing disparities in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color (CDC 2013).

In addition, municipal and regional transportation policies that improve multimodal access to healthy food are needed to improve access for individuals and families who have limited access to a private automobile (Swayne and Lowery 2021). Some examples of this might include explicit consideration of food access when determining public transit routes and schedules, and the provision of community vans or shuttle buses to link residents directly to food outlets (Dumas et al. 2021). Previous survey work among U.S. municipalities has found that less than 15% of cities offer community vans and/or shuttle buses, and less than 40% of cities with public transit considered food access when route planning (Dumas et al. 2021). While these results suggest scant attention to food access in the context of transportation planning and provision, these approaches can and should be implemented by local government and transportation officials to support access to healthy food (Dumas et al. 2021). Where robust public transportation networks already exist to link residents to food outlets, opportunities may exist to increase ridership through improvements to the transit network. Potential system improvements to increase ridership might include improving the experience of out-of-vehicle walking, waiting, and transfer times by enhancing station environments, reducing transfer times, and making system ingress–egress easier (Park, Farb, and Chen 2021).

General Discussion

This article introduces Social Entrepreneurial Action Research (SEAR), a process that uses social enterprises to advance an iterative cycle of research insights leading to societal change and business innovations. SEAR is driven by community stakeholders, grounded in research, and focused on ongoing societal transformation. This article describes its theoretical foundation and demonstrates its application using a case study that provides illustrative examples from a social enterprise as it went through the stages of the research process.

As the need for unique, innovative solutions to extensive localized social problems continues to grow, SEAR provides a research process that academics and social entrepreneurs can use to address these difficult challenges with solutions that are community-based and long-lasting, and that result in societal transformation. Fundamental to SEAR and the success of the social enterprise is the network of stakeholders who are active collaborators in the process, increase trust, and provide sustainability for the social enterprise in the community. The SEAR process provides researchers who are actively engaged in finding solutions to extensive localized social problems an approach for becoming active participants in identifying the societal problem, developing and implementing the solution, and driving societal transformation so that they are not only providing community stakeholders with findings but actually collaborating with them on implementing a solution. The case study demonstrated that social enterprises that are developed using this approach can lead to societal transformation with a concrete impact on the daily lives of residents living in the communities served.

The SEAR process is a unique contribution to existing research in marketing, as the social enterprise goes beyond community relational engagements (e.g., organizational partnerships, community building, commercialization; Ozanne, Davis, and Ekpo 2022) to create an innovation-based venture. It contributes to CAR by embedding the social enterprise in the research process as the action-formation mechanism that drives societal change through economic and social objectives (Saebi, Foss, and Linder 2019). Further, the case study illustrates how the SEAR process can be used to navigate tensions between economic and social objectives, as well as the challenges of meeting the often disparate expectations of different stakeholders (Gupta et al. 2019).

This research contributes to the growing focus in business on intellectual contributions that advance knowledge and practice while addressing important policy questions, measuring societal impact, and providing actionable recommendations for businesses and policy makers that can help improve the situation for communities experiencing social inequities (AACSB 2020; Block, Vallen, and Warlop 2022; Mende and Scott 2021; Scott, Hassler, and Martin 2022).

The presentation of a social enterprise that is focused on addressing the spatial inequality of healthy food access also adds to the literature on food and health (Martin, Borah, and Scott 2021) and contributes to the growing focus on food well-being (Block et al. 2011; Bublitz et al. 2019; Scott and Vallen 2019). It provides an example of the Food Well-Being Paradigm in action by demonstrating that research focused on achieving societal transformation can be theory-driven, rigorous, and impactful. SEAR introduces a novel means for conducting research into a key dimension of the Food-Well Being Paradigm—affordable food access—by transforming the role of liquor, corner, and convenience stores (Bublitz et al. 2019). Our work reveals that social enterprises can be useful mechanisms to make healthy food more accessible, available and affordable. Future research can investigate the role of the social enterprise in different kinds of environments and in increasing access to other resources and services.

Footnotes

Joint Editors in Chief

Jeremy Kees and Beth Vallen

Associate Editor

Brennan Davis

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: BrightSide Produce is supported in part by the County of San Diego CalFresh Healthy Living Program (funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-SNAP), by the intramural research program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Community Food Projects Competitive Grant Program, and by San Diego State University. The findings and conclusions in this publication have not been formally disseminated by the U. S. Department of Agriculture and should not be construed to represent any agency determination or policy.

ORCID iD

Bryce C. Lowery

Notes

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