Quality assurance and labeling play an important and increasing role in firms’ marketing strategies. In almost all cases, a price incentive has been stressed as the major incentive for firms to participate in such schemes. We argue here that important non-price incentives for participation in...

This paper uses plant-level micro-data covering the 1987-2002 and a translog cost function to estimate long-run costs in the meat and poultry industry in order to evaluate the impact of the Pathogen Reduction Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point Rule on cattle, hog and chicken slaughter and...

In recent decades the northwestern part of Germany (Weser-Ems region) has come to focus on intensive pork production. This has led to public outrage about the disposal of biological waste, farmers’ complaints about the high cost of leasing land, soaring risks of animal diseases, and the...

Western-European consumers have become not only more demanding on product availability in retail outlets but also on other food attributes such as quality, integrity, and safety. When (re)designing food supply-chain networks, from a logistics point of view, one has to consider these demands next...

Market orientation (MO) – which is the propensity of a firm to collect and utilise information from the market – is an important leverage of competitive advantage. This paper helps to better understand why some owner-managers engage with market intelligence why others simply do not. The...

The present paper aims at answering the question how cluster organization functions are implemented in a high-tech, a medium to high-tech and a low to medium-tech cluster. Data were collected by semi-structured interviews from three clusters in the Netherlands, an agri-food cluster (as an...

The objective of this study is to analyze consumer behaviour in relation to functional foods by a direct survey. To this end, the proposal is an analysis of the reasons for choosing to consume this type of food or not, accompanied by a supplementary investigation, mostly to assess the...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

The life cycle approach is widely used in the analysis of sustainability. Its application to supply chains is necessary since the product flows, from processing of raw materials to the final customer, are considered. The role of the organizational aspects, expressed in terms of relationships...

The purpose of this proposal is to explore a new concept of 'Metadistrict' to be applied in a region of Southern Italy – Apulia - in order to analyze the impact that the activation of a special network between different sector chains and several integrated projects may have for revitalizing...