‘The cheese that tastes good and does good’: corporate social responsibility and national belonging in ICA’s Folke Cheese Initiative

This article critically examines the Folke Cheese Initiative, a corporate social responsibility project launched by the Swedish supermarket retailer ICA in 2017 and linked to its hard cheese brand, Folke. Using an historical–archival approach to multimodal critical discourse analysis, the study traces the Initiative’s evolution across product development, launch and promotion, call to action and impact, analysing social media campaigns, promotional videos, packaging and websites. The analysis demonstrates how ICA constructs Folke as a symbol of national identity, embedding banal nationalist cues, familiar landscapes and rural imagery, while linking consumption to collective responsibility and social good. While the Initiative foregrounds community engagement, sustainability and national cohesion, it offers limited solutions to structural social and economic inequalities. Folke, thus, exemplifies how food packaging – and its associated promotional materials – can function as strategic instruments, aligning with Swedish social-democratic values while extending corporate influence over local communities. By presenting everyday consumption as a contribution to society, ICA positions itself as a socially responsible actor, even as the long-term efficacy of the Initiative remains uncertain. Overall, this case contributes new insights into the temporal evolution of corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse, the multimodal construction of product-based social responsibility and the national specificity of sustainability practices in the Swedish food retail sector.