The rise of private food quality and safety standards: Illustrations from Brazil

By T. Reardon, E. Farina. 2001

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past decade, the private sector has rapidly built up an array of private food standards to assure quality and safety in a fiercely competitive market. These private standards have sometimes been to fill in for missing public standards, especially for safety, and to differentiate products and build reputation, for both quality and safety. Moreover, private standards are increasingly related to meta-management systems assuring both quality and safety at all levels of a chain, enforcing and certifying the implementation of process standards. The privatization of standards has been important for both buyers and suppliers in the chain. They tend to be formulated and imposed by buyers (retailers and processors), and are key to their cost control and reputation with consumers, thus overall competitiveness. They are imposed on suppliers, who often find that the standards imply very substantial outlays for reporting, new equipment, and training. The lucky - a relatively small subset of the original set of suppliers - tend to find that meeting the standards, with formal certification in hand, benefits their business, opens new opportunities. The excluded tend to find themselves relegated to waning and unprofitable markets. The above points concerning the determinants and effects of the formulation and implementation of private standards are illustrated with cases from the dairy, coffee, wheat products, and coconut product chains in Brazil.

Subfields: Food Science, Management Information Systems, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5cba09d295b5c068939a64c25e4e3ddea9488517

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In Food Science

T. Reardon

In Management Information Systems

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In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Performing the economy, performing science: from neoclassical to supply chain models in the agrifood sector (2007, unknown): “2003; Reardon and Farina 2001).”
Governance in the Global Agro-food System: Backlighting the Role of Transnational Supermarket Chains (2005, background): “It is also argued, by both researchers (Reardon and Farina, 2002) and businesses, that public bodies often do not have the capacity to set appropriate standards in all areas necessary and/or that public processes are too slow.”
The Rapid Rise of Supermarkets in Developing Countries: Induced Organizational, Institutional, and Technological Change in Agrifood Systems (2004, background): “The latter were inadequate either to meet consumer demand for product differentiation and quality differences, or to reward producers for their investments in quality and safety (Reardon et al. 2001; Reardon and Farina 2002).”