Food and nutrition systems are linked to all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which makes their transition toward social-ecological behavior patterns crucial for an overarching sustainability transformation (Rockström and Sukhdev, 2016; Willett et al., 2019). Food production and consumption systems are investigated from various perspectives, but so far only to a limited degree from the perspective of interconnecting logistics (Poore and Nemecek, 2018). Proposing visionary scenarios about the design of food systems and its product service systems can lead the way forward.

Existing research focuses on differentiated aspects of consumption and production as major cornerstones for a transformation of food systems. There are various contributions in the context of lifestyle changes and behavior addressing nutritional aspects, environmental footprints of diets or menues, or cooking and disposal behavior (Schmidt and Matthies, 2018; Speck et al., 2020). On the production side, examples of recent research address the transition of agricultural systems toward approaches with less negative ecological impacts, e.g., on biodiversity, as well as the sustainability management of supply chains (Rockström et al., 2017).

In this context, the perspective of (urban) logistics is of special interest. It couples the production and consumption physically and virtually. We understand logistics as a functional interconnecting system carrying nutrients from agriculture, agroforestry, or synthetic production through economy and society. Logistics interacts with attitudes, interpretations and associated action patterns that materialize in objects and service systems (Shove et al., 2012). Therefore, logistics becomes a central management tool and can support establishing resource-efficient product-service systems and lifestyles with low carbon and material footprints (Lettenmeier et al., 2014; Lettenmeier, 2019).

Here, we shed light on the design of the turnover point of food in urban areas from the supply chain toward consumers. We contribute to an overarching systemic perspective toward establishing a sustainable multilevel food system. At the turnover point, the requirements of both, production and consumption, need to be met and interact with each other. Looking at examples of within-minutes grocery delivery services such as Gorillaz, Getir, or GoPuff, steady physical accessibility to a diverse selection of food products seems to be the standard demand pattern of many consumers driven by options offered by the internet and the COVID-19 pandemic (Murphy et al., 2020). Only a highly efficient logistic system allows for this propelling demand to be met. Logistics horizontally connects the associated product-service systems and plays a key role for organizing lifestyles, households, grocery stores, and out-of-home catering as an integrated nutritional system. Currently, the turnover point of food toward consumers is mainly designed to simply meet the demand. There is huge potential to design this point of interaction differently for a sustainability transformation of food systems.

Departing from this rationale, we summarize current patterns observed in urban food systems and summarize principles that can guide the sustainable design of food systems. We exemplarily use selected principles to generate design scenarios of the logistic urban turnover point. We finally derive several research questions for the way forward.

We describe current patterns in urban food systems along the perspectives of diets, place of ordering, and place of consumption. As a frame for discussing these patterns, we focus on negative environmental and health impacts that could be reduced by adopting more sustainable production and consumption patterns.

Diet patterns in modern urban areas of industrialized countries result in severe pressures on the environment, have strong negative health impacts and may lead to social imbalance. Thus, the proportion of nutritionally valuable product groups such as fruit, vegetables and high-fiber foods in the diet of industrialized countries is lower than recommendations by research and public bodies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) suggest (Zinöcker and Lindseth, 2018; Carbone et al., 2019; Willett et al., 2019; FAO, 2020). Despite a trend toward more vegan and vegetarian diets in certain social milieus and the increasing availability of plant-based meat substitutes in supermarkets and discounters, the consumption of meat and dairy products exceeds a sustainable level regarding health and the environment (FAO, 2020; Rödl, 2021). The variety of food offers has increased and opens up new possibilities of nutrition, diets and enjoyment. In average, still, the current diet patterns are characterized by a too high calorie, fat, sat and sugar intake, in particular, because of high consumption of fast food or convenience products and sugar-sweetened foods and soft drinks (Zinöcker and Lindseth, 2018; Carbone et al., 2019; Willett et al., 2019).

So far, the existing dietary patterns are conditioned by a close interaction of dietary culture and trends, as well as the nutrition and shopping environment and exposure to food (WBAE, 2020). The classical supermarket is still the most important grocery sales channel, followed by hypermarkets and discount stores. The range of products offered in food retail and accordingly the size of supermarkets have increased steadily over the past 50 years (European Commission, 2014). The most common mode of transport for consumers to reach these purchasing locations–the so-called last mile–is by car (Stelwagen et al., 2021). Online grocery retail is still a niche but a trending segment due to an increase in door-to-door delivery services during the Covid-19 pandemic (Worthy, 2021). An overarching systemic and spatial management of food supply structures is missing. Out-of-home catering is the second largest sales channel in the food industry and apart from short-term declines during the Covid-19 pandemic, the market is growing strongly (BVE, 2021). Reasons for this include increasing mobility due to longer distances between work and home, but also the improved economic situation of households (BVE, 2021). This leads to a dissolution of classical meal structures (time and place) and the need for prepared food that is available at various locations at any time.

The expanding number of articles in supermarkets and discount stores as well as an extensive gastronomy and fast-food offering in urban areas are significantly increasing our exposure to ubiquitous food availability. Thus, the food supply is now independent of traditional seasonal and regional availability with major implications for consumer behavior and eating habits. For example, spatial differences in the distribution of such concentrated food sources show systematic associations with overweight and obesity (Cooksey-Stowers et al., 2017; Aiello et al., 2019). One reason is the exposure to, often “unhealthy, ” snack and take-away foods in environments where we are under more time pressure–such as the workplace (Burgoine and Monsivais, 2013). High amounts of food losses also characterize the food systems in the context of modern urban areas that are mostly caused at the end of the value chain at retail and consumer levels (Gustavsson, 2011). For example in Germany, the majority of food waste, more than a half, is generated in private households, resulting in food waste on consumer level of 75 kilograms per person and year compared to about 365 kg per person an year of food intake (Noleppa and Cartsburg, 2015). Inadequate planning of household purchases is an important factor. Appropriate purchasing strategies are often lacking, so that too frequent and too much is bought and the subsequent consumption is not always possible in the necessary time. This also includes a lack of knowledge about the quantity of stocks at home. Supporting factor is the food retail with too large package sizes as well as promotions, which encourage purchases without the product actually being needed (Gustavsson, 2011; Noleppa and Cartsburg, 2015).

Transforming food systems toward sustainability requires positive principles that can guide the process of establishing successful sustainable product-service-systems. In the following Table 1, we consolidate principles emerging from a short literature review and our own ongoing transdisciplinary research. Obviously, the table is incomprehensive and only a starting point to structure, reflect, and assess this kind of principles.

Using above principles and relying on methods of sustainable transition design (Liedtke et al., 2020, p. 164), we provide four design scenarios that concretely imagine future urban food consumption and production patterns. We picked a selection of principles as an orientation and explored potential future patterns. Using a selection only leads to blind spots, of course, but helps to explore and understand the nature of individual principles for using them in more comprehensive approaches. Here, the resulting scenarios are an attempt to translate principles into a tangible form of communication to better express their meaning and potential impact. In accordance with the basic idea of speculative design (Dunne and Raby, 2013), we interpret the principles here in an extreme form leading to rather dystopian or utopian scenarios.

In Table 2, we briefly describe and assess the scenarios that we named “slow stock supply service, ” “deliver into the daily walk, ” “central district food depot, ” “super food action place.” We also provide a rough qualitative impact assessment of the potential realization of the scenarios.

A key aspect that we promote with our principles and sketches of tangible scenarios is that product-service systems should be based on (regional) collaboration and food literacy in order to reach sustainability targets. We are convinced that such collaboration can be economically beneficial for households, economy, and government. With this work we provide a starting for reflecting whether certain combinations of principles actually lead to patterns of daily life that are feasible, acceptable, or desirable. Moreover, we provide an initial qualitative assessment to stimulate further research that explores scenario pathways and incorporates additional indicators regarding the impact on social-ecological systems. A challenging but promising task will be to describe the kind of presented rough sketches more quantitatively considering additional characterizing dimensions and assess their economic feasibility and evaluate them within more robust theory-based impact assessment models (Coryn et al., 2011; Ibrahim et al., 2018). On this basis, combinations of principles could then be ranked regarding their impacts on sustainability and finally introduced in high-level decision-making. Our approach leads us to the following incomprehensive list of various research questions that we deem relevant for the transformation of food systems.

These detailed questions should all be seen in light of the general overarching question of how urban food logistics should be designed to be consistent with the SDGs.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.

CT, MB, and LH:conceptualization and writing. MS and CL:supervision and reviewing. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This article is based on contributions of research projects with public German funding, namely Circular by Design (033R244), NAHGAST (01UT1409C), NAHGAST II (01UT1902C), and BiTe (01UT2006) funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research as well as SCI4climate. NRW funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Innovation, Digitalization and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. We further acknowledge financial support by Wuppertal Institut für Klima, Umwelt, Energie gGmbH within the funding programme Open Access Publishing.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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