Abstract
Food fraud not only exacerbates human public health risks but also threatens the business development of food and related industries. Therefore, how to curb food fraud effectively becomes a crucial issue for governments, industries, and consumers. Previous studies have demonstrated that enterprise food fraud is subject to joint influences of factor at various hierarchical levels within a complex system of stakeholders. To address enterprise food fraud, it is necessary to identify the key such factors and elucidate the functional mechanisms, as well as systematic analysis of the interrelationships among clusters and factors. Hence, we grounded on a social co-governance perspective and investigated the food fraud key influencing factors and their interrelationships in an emerging food market – China, by using the DEMATEL-based analytic network process (DANP). Results showed that the identified key cluster was government regulation, social governance, and detection techniques. Four other key factors were also identified, including government regulatory capability and penalty intensity, expected economic benefits, maturity of market reputation mechanism, and transparency of supply chain. Policy implications from the social co-governance perspective for China and similar economies are discussed finally.
Highlights
Food fraud is a collective term used to encompass the deliberate substitution, addition, tampering, or misrepresentation of food, food ingredients, or food packaging or false/misleading statements made about a product for economic gain [1,2,3,4,5]
Studies on the correlations among clusters and factors that motivate enterprise food fraud and how such clusters and factors jointly influence enterprise food fraud remain limited. Heeding to such thoughts of the gaps in the literature, we argue that studies need to explore key factors of food fraud from more systematic and holistic theoretical lens and methodology, such as the social co-governance perspective and the DEMATEL-based analytic network process (DANP) method proposed here
In a complex system encompassing multiple stakeholders, we found that enterprise food fraud was subject to joint influences by multiple clusters
Summary
Food fraud is a collective term used to encompass the deliberate substitution, addition, tampering, or misrepresentation of food, food ingredients, or food packaging or false/misleading statements made about a product for economic gain [1,2,3,4,5]. The discovery in 2013 of the addition of horsemeat to certain products in many European countries is another example of significant food fraud [18] Such incidents have led governments and relevant organizations in various countries to step up food safety regulation [19]. The existing research only analyzes the influence of various factors on the fraud behavior of food companies. About 50% of food safety incidents in China are caused by food fraud, which is the result of the combination of complex factors such as the huge return from food consumption market, the large number of food enterprises with insufficient integrity, and the weakness of food supervision in China, etc., which might be different from the United States and the European Union but similar to most developing countries. Using China as the research object to study food fraud is reasonably significant and is of positive value in understanding the causes of food fraud/counterfeiting in similar economies’ contexts with potential measures that might be taken by the whole society
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