Eating good food with a bamboo fork

This inductive study is based on interviews with 32 sustainable food trucks in the Netherlands and we take the richness of the data as our starting point. In this study we explore the question: how do Dutch sustainable food truck entrepreneurs act upon their values while creating a viable business? We position this research as a study of business decisions from the perspective of the entrepreneur, following the call of Smith & Tracey (2016) for researchers “to view the world from the perspective of their informants, rather than assuming a set of tensions at the outset” (p.461). When we explored how Dutch sustainable food truck entrepreneurs try to balance different interests, we found that they are willing to compromise on certain issues, but that other issues are considered to be core to their business and values, and are treated as non-negotiable. For us, this signals that sustainable entrepreneurs may work with an inclusive logic at the core of their business, where the goal is to run a business that is in line with their values, and therefore has to be both financially and environmentally sustainable. Around this core we find the more operational business decisions, where the concerns of running a viable business and contributing to a better world are more explicitly traded off. We will start this paper with some theoretical observations, followed by our results.