Rendering soil care across hotel, retailer, and farm, with a Mutuality Service Blueprint

Food retailers and hoteliers aiming at eco-social transitions struggle to show tangible impact on the ground. Since sustainable food systems necessitate internal reconfigurations of service structure, exploring value creation concerning the local environment and community is essential. Design management tools are challenged to deliver mutualist conditions that respond to the needs of soils and humans. We explore what an eco-social Mutuality Service Blueprint entails based on an empirical pilot case. Here, 13 hoteliers and 17 retail customers in Hong Kong became soil care service providers over 43 weeks by diverting 4800 liters of food waste for composting and growing 1500 kg of organic crops that provided food assistance to families in need. Our redesigned blueprint helps clarify the pragmatics of care practices and prompts the redefinition of success parameters and fail points. It calls for forging cross-sectoral partnerships, practical experimentation, and organizational diversity. Inversing the blueprint’s onstage and backstage subordinates service performances to eco-social conditions but also provokes questions on how to accomplish circularity while holding market offerings accountable to these conditions. Our paper presents an implementation case in soil-caring hospitality and concludes with a human/soil disposition matrix for inspiring further service-by-mutuality prototyping.