Corporate Social Responsibility in Italian agri-food firms: the relationship between CSR actions and firm’s performance

Over last years, many firms introduced environmental and social sustainability in their business mission and adopted Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as the operative tool of a new business model. Studies on the agri-food sector studies mainly focused on the measures of firms’ CSR, the integration of CSR into the firm’s business strategy, the relationship between CSR and firm’s performance or more generally value creation in the supply chain, and on consumers’ perception of CSR. The present work aims at verifying whether a relationship between CSR strategies of agri-food firms and their economic and financial performance exists and the role innovations eventually play. The present work represents a preliminary analysis and only has a descriptive nature. Nevertheless, its results give useful insights to better specify the model CSR-performance.