Cooperatives and sustainability drivers in the Spanish wine sector. What differences do we find with investor owner firms?

Abstract

The fight against climate change has become a basic vector for agri-food business strategies. In Spain, commercial wineries (Investor Owner Firms, IOFs) and cooperatives are facing major challenges in adapting to the most stringent environmental requirements and in becoming sustainable and environmentally responsible companies. The European winemaking model, unlike its “new world” competitors, has a very distinct configuration with the predominance of the social economy in parallel with capitalist enterprises. However, these two forms of business organization are different in terms of objectives, position in the value chain, type of organization and form of management. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether these two types of companies have a different orientation towards sustainability, and which are the drivers that facilitate a greater approach to sustainability in each group. With a sample of 411 wineries, the results of the study show a lower orientation towards sustainability among the cooperatives, without a relevant alignment of their resources towards this objective. However, IOFs orient their resources towards sustainability in a consistent and strategic way. This may infer that the European model, with a clear advantage in the social component, could be somewhat more limited in the environmental aspect.