This study aims to define the concept of craftsmanship from the perspective of craft chocolate makers and explore how their understanding of craftsmanship is reflected in their organizational practices and the scaling of their businesses. The research is motivated by the desire of craft chocolate makers to expand the niche market for craft chocolate, thereby increasing the share of sustainable and fair-trade cocoa in the industry.However, consumers remain confused by various claims such as ‘bean-to-bar’, ‘single-origin’, ‘single-estate’, and ‘direct-trade’, making it challenging for the niche to clearly present itself.
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Côte d’Ivoire produces about 42 percent of the world’s total Cocoa but processes only a very few amount of the production. A big part of the country depends on the commercial benefits of the Cocoa production and supply chain of it. For that reason, the World Bank asked the simulation group of the Amsterdam U. of Applied Sciences in collaboration with the Port of Amsterdam to develop a simulation model that allows the politicians assess the performance of the supply chain of the Cocoa in that region of the world. The simulation model gave light to the potential of improvement in the supply chain by identifying inefficiencies, bottlenecks and blockers that hinder the efficient transport of Cocoa in the chain with the consequence of low productivity. The most important results are presented in the article together with suggestions for improvement in order to increase the wellbeing of the farmers in that region of Africa.
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Côte d’Ivoire produces about 42 percent of the world’s total Cocoa but processes only a very few amount of the production. A big part of the country depends on the commercial benefits of the Cocoa production and supply chain of it. For that reason, the World Bank asked the simulation group of the Amsterdam U. of Applied Sciences in collaboration with the Port of Amsterdam to develop a simulation model that allows the politicians assess the performance of the supply chain of the Cocoa in that region of the world. The simulation model gave light to the potential of improvement in the supply chain by identifying inefficiencies, bottlenecks and blockers that hinder the efficient transport of Cocoa in the chain with the consequence of low productivity. The most important results are presented in the article together with suggestions for improvement in order to increase the wellbeing of the farmers in that region of Africa.
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This paper proposes an epistemological transition based on Edgar Morin's complexity paradigm to analyse authenticity in a complex tourism environment, avoiding fragmentation, and integrating relevant actors and relationships. The results show that storytelling is an important element of these tourism experiences, legitimising and unifying the authenticity of the experience and relating objects, social environment and individual experiences. The size of the tour groups and the rigidity of the itinerary were important elements for constructing authenticity. Tourists, service providers and government bodies all directly or indirectly participate as co-creators, making the perception of authenticity a constant negotiation between the elements of the experience and the actors involved in it.
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European Union’s vulnerability to climate change stretches far beyond its borders because many of its economic sectors, such as meat and dairy, use raw materials sourced from far afield. Cross-border climate vulnerability is a relatively new subject in scientific literature, while of high societal and economic relevance. We quantify these climate vulnerabilities with a focus on drought risk and assessed them for 2030, 2050, 2085 and for RCP 2.6 and 6.0 climate scenarios. Here we find that more than 44% of the EU agricultural imports will become highly vulnerable to drought in future because of climate change. The drought severity in production locations of the agricultural imports in 2050 will increase by 35% compared to current levels of drought severity. This is particularly valid for imports that originate from Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, India and Turkey. At the same time, imports from Russia, Nigeria, Peru, Ecuador, Uganda and Kenya will be less vulnerable in future. We also report that the climate vulnerabilities of meat and dairy, chocolate (cocoa), coffee, palm oil-based food and cosmetic sectors mainly lie outside the EU borders rather than inside.
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More and more information labels appear on the front of food packages, increasing the complexity of consumer decision-making and enhancing consumer scepticism toward food labels. It is important to evaluate the efficacy of information communicated to consumers. The experimental study among 209 Dutch consumers compared the effect of health and hedonic labels on consumer scepticism toward the labels and consumer responses to food products (apple juice and a chocolate cookie) under three presentation conditions (visual, visual-tactile and multisensory). The results demonstrated that consumers were more sceptical toward the hedonic label than toward the health label. The influence of consumer scepticism on product experience, product evaluation and purchase intention varied for different product categories. For a hedonic product (a chocolate cookie), the hedonic label had a more positive effect on consumer responses compared to the health label. The results also showed that the multisensory presentation reduced scepticism and enhanced product evaluation for the hedonic product compared to the visual and tactile presentations. The results suggest that multisensory experience may alter consumer scepticism toward food labels and thus product evaluation and consumer choice. Our findings can be useful for food manufacturers and policy makers in evaluating the efficacy of food labels and information presented on food packages.
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This paper describes a study into consumers' reasons for buying socially responsible (SR) products, such as Fair Trade products and organic meat. As opposed to other studies, we use a qualitative approach based on 25 in-depth interviews and include several different products in the research. This leads to several new results, such as: (1) buying SR products is perceived as an imperfect moral duty; (2) low quality of SR products is a dissatisfier, but high quality not a satisfier; (3) the attitude towards SR products is related to the reputation of charitable funds; (4) the demand for SR products is negatively related to the frequency of purchasing SR products; (5) reflection on SR products raises the demand for SR products; (6) consumers that have witnessed the social problems that SR products aim to alleviate purchase more SR products. Finally, we find that the demand for different SR products is correlated: if a consumer buys one SR product, it is more likely that (s)he purchases other SR products as well.
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How can we make Inquiry-Based Science and Mathematics Education (IBSME) durable? …. by incorporating it in the pre-service programs for elementary teachers! With pre-service students the training can be much more intensive than with inservice teachers. To have an impact in the classroom the minimum contact time in IBSME in-service and coaching has to be more than 90 hours (Supovitz & Turner, 2000). That number is hard to achieve in in-service but it is quite possible in preservice teacher education. From 9 – 11 January 2013 the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) hosted a field-visit sponsored by the EU Fibonacci project with a focus on pre-service teacher education. HvA developed two programs to strengthen IBSME in pre-service. One is an elective minor (30 ECTS) Science and Technology Education in the regularelementary teacher education program. The other is a pre-service program for academically talented students jointly developed by the University of Amsterdam and the Hogeschool of Amsterdam with inquiry as a major emphasis. The two programs are described in chapters 1 & 3 in this booklet. If you are still wondering what IBSE is, then read chapter 2 of Ana Blagotinsek of the University of Slovenia. She describes a neat example of an IBSE process with students in elementary teacher education. How do you start with a real worldquestion and initially little knowledge, and how do you investigate the question and eventually generate the knowledge needed to answer it? During the field-visit each participant presented one particularly successful approach in teacher training, for example, training teachers by ‘model teaching’ activities with these teachers’ own pupils. This method was used in different ways by 4 participants in different countries. They describe this in chapters 4 – 7. In chapter 8 colleague Frans Van Mulken describes the development of a lessonseries on graphs, rate of change, and speed using inquiry strategies inspired by the late mathematician and mathematics educator Hans Freudenthal. He also describes how pre-service students could be trained to teach the lesson series as inquiry. Simultaneously with this booklet, a Dutch booklet is published with overlapping contents but focused more on the Dutch context.
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