Circular economy business: a case study of wastegetable farm at center one shopping mall

This paper first discusses several literature and articles on the topics of food waste and its management, retail corporate strategies regarding food waste, food consumption trends among consumers, and shopping malls development trends that provide a foundation of which critical analysis and discussions are built up on. From the literature review, there seems to be a gap between the urban food waste and the urban agriculture despite both being part of the urban food supply chain. The conceptual framework of the circular economy from the Cradle-to-Cradle literature written by Braungart and McDonough is identified to bridge the gap and applied in the analysis of the characteristics and the business model of the chosen case of ‘Wastegetable’ rooftop farm at Center One shopping mall developed by Bangkok Rooftop Farming, and how this farm model could contribute to consumption-stage food waste reduction at the shopping mall.Then, the paper argues that the business model of the circular urban farm is a waste management system that keeps the ‘food’ in use for regeneration within a system according to the Cradle-to-Cradle circular economy framework. The key findings of this paper are that the Wastegetable farm characteristics correspond those in the circular economy’s biological cycle, which are the designing out waste, i.e., keeping the biological nutrients from the ‘waste’ as ‘food’ in use within the biological cycle, and the biological regeneration. Furthermore, while keeping the circular economy characteristics, Wastegetable could also sustain itself financially by building a business model based on the circular economy framework.