Diet and lifestyle are closely interrelated and believed to have a significant influence on four major public diseases - cardiovascular disease, cancer, hypertension and obesity, but also affects functional deficiencies like gluten- and lactose intolerance. Health added-value foods are thought to reduce health-related risks or delay the onset of these major diseases. Therefore, interest among scientists, researchers and the public in general has been growing remarkably over the last decade regarding these special foods. The Swedish market seems to be a good target for health added-values food. However, as there are many risks and cost factors involved for companies to enter the market or invest in R&D, it is important to take a step back and analyze the current market situation.

AbstractIn the fall of 2003 a project was started in the Swedish building sector that is called BASTA (the building sectors’ termination of especially harmful substances). The project is operated by the building companies NCC, Skanska, PEAB and JM, the Swedish Building Industry and the Swedish Environmental Institute IVL. The purpose of the project is to create a common environmental assessment system for the entire building industry and with the help of this system phase out the use of especially harmful properties from building products.In a large sense BASTA works like this; On the BASTA web site there is a database, to which a supplier can register the company and the company’s products. Only those products with a substance content that fulfil the demands of the BASTA system, is to be registered. As it is the supplier himself that carries out the registration of the company and the company’s products to the system, the BASTA-organisation annually controls that the companies that are registered in the database, fulfils BASTA’s demands.Since NCC is one of the companies that operates BASTA, BASTA is probably going to be the environmental assessment system that is recommended for the company in the future.

The purpose of this thesis was to describe what factors influence consumers? choice when buying probiotic products. Functional Foods have been predicted a bright future on the food market but so far the concept have not been embraced by the consumers. The reasons for this are many and not clearly understood. Positive health effects are what set a functional food product apart from traditional food stuffs of the same type.

This thesis deals with past and present political attitudes towards the Öresund bridge. It describes the decision making process which preceded the construction of the bridge, and has a short historical introduction to it. It then presents the attitudes towards the bridge of five different political parties, all represented by regional politicians. This empirical information was obtained through interviews with politicians and literature studies. The author then analyzes the empirical information with the help of the human ecological triangle developed by Steiner, and the center-periphery theories of Wallerstein and Persson.To conclude, the author describes what the central problem is in the case of the Öresund bridge from a human ecological perspective and analyzes the empirical data collected..

This degree project was intendet to construct and design packaging for beauty care. At the requestof AssiDomän Frövi the project group were instructed to innovate creative packagesmade of their cardboard Frövi Bright.Three different packages have been developed. Two of them are for child care products and onepackage is for several bath products. These results show that there are possibilities to create creativeand different packages of the cardboard Frövi Bright.The report also enters deeply into the special qualities of Frövi Bright and studies of packagingdesign..

For the last 50 years the amount of available consumer goods has exploded in number, due to improvements in production and technology. The problem is that the overall sales of many categories are stagnant and retailers are unwilling to grant the categories more shelf space. Therefore many categories are crowded with products and hard for consumers to navigate in. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of an assortment reduction on several variables relating to assortment perceptions, customer satisfaction and store choice. The study was carried out as an experiment with 127 participants.

Our purpose of this paper is to seek an understanding of which service quality factors that affects customers in their decision making progress regarding purchasing financial services such as pension products. We also seek to evaluate the different service quality factors by compare their relative strength against each other. The study aim to investigate if there are any connections between customer behavior variables such as gender, age and income in comparison to these service quality factors related to pension products.The findings aim to help a small financial institute such as our case company Plain Capital to understand how their customers experience service quality regarding pension products.In order to find empirical results we conducted a qualitative research as well a quantitative research. The qualitative research employed both a focus group interview with pension savers and an interview with our case company Plain Capital. We were able to identify the service quality factors for pension?s products with help from the focus group interview.

Sustainable urban development is a concept that has become increasingly important as the urbanization continues and more and more challenges are focused to the cities.  The Swedish government and authorities regulates and sets goals for how a sustainable urban development is to be achieved. These laws and goals are vaguely defined, which leads to disputes between the actors about how the term should be interpreted. By examining Västermalms Strand, an urban development project in Stockholm, this study strives to describe how involved actors interpret the concept of sustainable urban development and what the consequences of this are for urban development in Stockholm from an ecological, social and economic perspective. A case study has been carried out where a document study and interviews have been conducted. The interviews were conducted with four key actors from the private and public sector.

Nature conservation has for a long time been founded on the assumption that high ecological values depend on low human impact. In Sweden this has led to forests with these characteristics being strictly protected from human influences. However, it is also known that historical land-use can enhance ecological values in forests. Mountainous forests in Sweden, which have not been affected by modern forestry, have for a long time been considered as untouched by people. However, forest history research has in recent years shown that even these areas have been used by people for a long period of time.

During the last year?s Swedish agriculture have had difficult times, with decreasing prices and at the same time increasing production costs, which has led to bad profitability and faith in the future. The dairies in Sweden have also had a rough time and there have been large rationalizations during the years. In the beginning of the 20th century there were almost 1700 diaries in the Swedish countryside. There has been a large technical development during the 20th century resulting in a decrease in diaries to only 46 in the whole country today. They are owned by 15 diary companies, of which 7 large and dominate on the market and the rest are small-scale companies. With this development the confidence and feeling for the diary companies also has decreased.

Product development is essential for all companies that want to survive in competitive markets regardless of the characteristics of the product that the company sells. Companies that sell products within product categories which can be seen as bad, also need to develop their products in order to remain competitive. If these bad products add a positive attribute, for example that they get organic, a contradiction within the product arises and they get incongruent. This thesis investigates which effects that follow a launch of an incongruent product. The thesis also examines if these effects are affected by the strength of the brand under which the product is launched.A total of 240 respondents participated in an experimental study where product incongruity was manipulated for two different product categories, where one well known brand and one unknown brand were examined in each category.

AbstractThe customer demand for Ecological products has increased in recent years, within the garden industry this mainly concerns herbs and other edible plants. The organic trend is increasing and more people are aware of the environment and want to take responsibility for it through their purchases for their garden as well.In this essay the aim is to investigate customer demand and the possibility of selling organicperennial plants in eight garden centres on the Åland islands and in Gävle/Sandviken. I include two garden centres with an organic profile to get a wider point of view. I investigate the global market for organic perennials and look further into existing certification standards on the Swedish market today.The methods I have been using are interviews and a literature study.The study shows that the experienced demand for organic perennials is small in both of myinvestigated groups. The biggest motivation for starting to sell organic perennials would be to find a supplier of these plants and that more customer would ask for them.

Detta arbete syftar huvudsakligen till att bidra med rekommendationer för hur ett system för mätning av kvalitetsbristkostnader hos ABB-enheten Control products Sweden bör upprättas. ABB:s globala riktlinjer för vad som ska mätas i ett sådant system har fungerat som utgångspunkt. I rapporten diskuteras vidare hur arbetet med mätsystemet ska upprätthållas utifrån ett ledarskapsperspektiv. I studien har en litteraturstudie legat till grund för en nulägesbeskrivning, en benchmarkingstudie, deltagande observationer och intervjuer. Rapporten innehåller också en sällsynt detaljerat beskriven kvalitetsbristkostnadsmätning som fungerar som riktmärke för enhetens fortsatta arbete med kvalitetsbristkostnader..

The competition amongst companies is getting tougher and the economic markets are getting even bigger with new products and businesses. One way for companies to differentiate themselves from the competitors is through packaging design. If the merchandise is to send a reliable and solid message to consumers, the attributes of the packaging must be consistent and uniform. If the different attributes are not coherent, the message loses credibility towards the consumer. Through the sent messages, the pack signals the products? expected quality and price.This paper includes two studies, in which the main objective is to discover and build understanding about Swedish consumers? perception of a product?s price depending on the pack?s design.

That ecological and evolutionary processes can take place on the same time scale is a recent insight. Today we also know that they are directly linked to each other. In the lake Tåkern, in year 2000, there was a structural change when phytoplankton declined and submerged vegetation, mainly stoneworts began to spread. This led to evolutionary changes in the aquatic sowbug, Asellus aquaticus which had previously been limited to the reed, most likely feeding on detritus. But then, sowbugs could exploit the new habitat in stoneworts and a new food resource in terms of periphyton.