What Drives the Food Safety Certification: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Food Companies in China

Abstract

Food safety is related to health and quality of life. Therefore, the social responsibility of the food industry to ensure food safety has received increasing attention. Influencing factors and mechanisms of participation in food safety certification are important issues in this field. Existing studies on factors affecting food safety certification mainly focus on the impact of a single or few factors. In this study, listed Chinese food companies were selected, and the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method was utilized to explore the matching mode of various factors to encourage companies to obtain food safety certification. The following results were obtained. (1) State-owned companies tend to achieve food safety certification. (2) Companies with high media attention are inclined to achieve food safety certification. (3) In state-owned companies, when the company size is small, a higher degree of food safety concern in the mission statement can encourage the company to achieve food safety certification, and when the company size is large, higher media attention can encourage the company to achieve food safety certification. (4) In non-state-owned companies, when food safety concerns are highlighted in the mission statement and media attention is relatively high, the company will gain food safety certification. This study provides new perspectives on food safety-related research and suggestions for government and the public sector to supervise food safety issues in enterprises.

Preference of Chinese food production enterprises to government regulatory Information——A choice experiment approach

“…Food safety incidents have been reported often in China in the past few years [ 1 ]. Not only have food safety incidents—ranging from "gutter oil" and "melamine" to "lean meat extract" and "earth pit pickled cabbage"—occurred frequently, but they have also seriously injured consumers' physical and mental health and damaged the reputation of government regulators [ 2 ]. Government regulators observe that producers and regulators have significant information asymmetries about food safety and quality in increasingly complex food supply chains.…”

Chinese Consumers’ Trust in Food Safety Surveillance Sampling of Commonly Consumed Foods

“…People are, however, paying more attention to food safety in China [2], as these food safety problems not only cause physical harm to consumers but also cause psychological panic. The degree of concern about food safety has gradually become an important key to measuring people's quality of life in China [3]. Consumers of commonly consumed foods are particularly concerned.…”