Food Safety Crises Research Articles

More politics, stronger consumers? A new division of responsibility for food in the European Union

In less than a decade, European food institutions have gone through a period of important reform. This reform was intended to address new challenges posed by a succession of food safety crises, the entry into the world markets of novel foods, and general public distrust of the actions of the European Commission. This paper sketches the most salient institutional changes that have occurred in the history of the European Union (EU). It also maps the redistribution of responsibilities in the European food system. After years of harmonisation in the name of free trade, in the mid-1990s food safety and consumer protection became the guiding principles of European food policy. Having described these changes, the paper suggests that a specifically European food policy style is emerging in juxtaposition with ‘transatlantic’ food policy.

Managing Risk and Regulation in European Food Safety Governance

AbstractThis article focuses on the state of European food safety governance and offers a view on possible future courses of regulatory policymaking. We begin by examining the deficiencies of the current multilevel governance system in European Union (EU) food safety policy, with an empirical focus on Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) systems. We then submit that a regulatory agency model (centralization) might perform better than multilevel governance or renationalization in terms of reducing business uncertainty, promoting food safety enhancing innovation, and improving consumer trust in the food supply. Hence it would make European food markets more resilient to recurrent food safety crises. We also argue that the EU's precautionary approach as applied to some areas of food safety risks is tied to legitimacy enhancing objectives of EU institutional actors. Assuming that supply‐side rents will change over time, we submit that emphasis of regulatory impact analysis (i.e., cost benefit considerations) is likely to increase.

Food safety, the media, and the information market

AbstractAvailability of information has increased rapidly over the past decades. Yet, information on food safety is still considered problematic. Economists have extensively researched the effects of imperfect information. However, little attention has been paid to the institutional organization of the supply of information and the incentive schemes in the information market. This paper analyzes how and when information is supplied by media organizations, and what the implications are. We first develop a theoretical framework and afterwards provide empirical evidence from media coverage of two recent food safety crises in Europe.

Batch dispersion model to optimise traceability in food industry

Facing many food safety crises, like BSE or foot-and-mouth disease, food companies try to limit incurred risk and to reassure consumers. So today, the point is not only to trace the products efficiently but also to minimize recalls and the number of batches constituting a given finished product. The problem studied concerns a sausage manufacturing process in a French food company. It tries to minimize the quantity of recalls when products are characterized by a 3-level “disassembling and assembling” bill of material. Such a “dispersion problem”, encountered in the food industry, has been modelled, solved and experimented. A mathematical MILP model is proposed and the results of experiments obtained with LINGO software are presented.

Consumer Response to Food Safety Crises

For marketers, health professionals, and parents, improving nutrition is essentially a process of encouraging consumers to make healthful choices that improve their well-being. What happens, however, when we believe contamination, terrorism, or a genetic incidence threatens a part of the food supply? Sometimes such crises influence the recall, redesign, and communication efforts of individual companies; other times they threaten entire industries. After showing how consumer attitudes toward food safety are formed, this review distinguishes four different segments of consumers who would be most influenced and most influential during a food crisis. De-coupling the risk response behavior of consumers into the separate components of risk perception and risk attitude shows how they will react differently in a food safety crisis situation. Using these insights, suggestions are made as to the implications this has for pre-crisis preparations and post-crisis responses. While pre-crisis preparations can eliminate the crisis altogether, post-crisis responses can help manage a crisis when it does occur.

The WTO and Food Safety Regulatory Policy Innovation in the European Union

This article, first, weighs the impact of exogenous developments associated with the supranational regulation of food safety in the World Trade Organization (WTO) relative to internal pressures associated with food safety crises and the breakdown of the internal market on food safety regulatory reforms underway in the European Union (EU); and second, probes the capacity and propensity of the Commission to act as a policy entrepreneur, leveraging the two arenas – the domestic and global – to expedite policy reforms. It finds evidence of Commission policy entrepreneurship at home and abroad, but cautions that the former is constrained by a mediative policy style dictated by the EU's institutional and legal framework and exacerbated by food safety crises.

Fair trading in markets for credence goods

Consumer concern about food quality issues has been increasing in Europe recently as a result of the series of food safety crises and the on-going debate on genetically engineered food products. The characteristics of a good which interest consumers in this connection cannot be directly ascertained by them, however. Credible mechanisms are required for monitoring these “credence characteristics” and signalling the results to consumers. The public authorities have an important role to play in this regard.