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Established in 2010, Mellower Coffee has 40 exquisite chain stores and three branches, namely Mellower Coffee Sales, Mellower Business Management and Shanghai Mellower Roasting Factory. Positioned as a premium coffee brand in China, Mellower Coffee has realized the integrated operation and management of the whole industrial chain from raw coffee trade, roasting factory, coffee retail products, specialty coffee chain, office coffee to coffee academy. It has a vision to attract and cultivate more and more coffee lovers by constant innovation coffee culture promotion.

Producers of specialty products that apply nonindustrial production techniques to deliver high quality and authenticity to niche markets define themselves in opposition to industrial production. This forces them to strike a delicate balance between, on the one hand, emphasizing the symbolic value related to quality, creativity and distance from traditional industrial production, and on the other hand, ensuring profitability through commercial orientation. This paper aims to explore how new and established firms benefit from a different balance between a strategic orientation toward creativity and the symbolic value of specialty products and commercialization.

Based on survey data from 99 specialty coffee roasters, this study uses statistical regression models to analyze how new versus established firms benefit from a strategic orientation toward creativity versus commercialization.

The authors find that firms benefit from shifting the balance from a strategic orientation on creativity in new firms to a strategic orientation on commercialization in more established firms. This shift increases the likelihood that firms’ passion and creativity lead to commercial success.

The findings demonstrate the importance of strategic orientation and emphasize that business owners need to revisit and adjust their strategic orientation as their businesses develop.

Agriculture commodity price forecasts have long been important for a variety of market players. The study we conducted aims to address this difficulty by examining the weekly wholesale price index of green grams in the Chinese market. The index covers a ten-year period, from January 1, 2010, to January 3, 2020, and has significant economic implications.

In order to address the nonlinear patterns present in the price time series, we investigate the nonlinear auto-regressive neural network as the forecast model. This modeling technique is able to combine a variety of basic nonlinear functions to approximate more complex nonlinear characteristics. Specifically, we examine prediction performance that corresponds to several configurations across data splitting ratios, hidden neuron and delay counts, and model estimation approaches.

Our model turns out to be rather simple and yields forecasts with good stability and accuracy. Relative root mean square errors throughout training, validation and testing are specifically 4.34, 4.71 and 3.98%, respectively. The results of benchmark research show that the neural network produces statistically considerably better performance when compared to other machine learning models and classic time-series econometric methods.

Utilizing our findings as independent technical price forecasts would be one use. Alternatively, policy research and fresh insights into price patterns might be achieved by combining them with other (basic) prediction outputs.

The purpose of this essay is to provide a better understanding of Africa's sport industry and demonstrate how the industry can be transformed.

To do so, the authors rely on their varied experiences within Africa's sport ecosystem. This includes reflections based on consuming sport in Africa, studying the sport business landscape, and first-hand experiences working inside African sport organizations.

The authors find that systemic challenges restrict the growth of Africa's sport industry; however, they maintain there are also reasons to be optimistic about the prospects of the industry.

While not an exhaustive list, the authors' commentary defines various research opportunities for scholars interested in both better understanding and improving Africa's sport industry.

The stated challenges and proposed strategies have the potential to inform decision-makers within Africa's sport ecosystem.

Crucial to the continued growth and development of the continent, the authors propose that investments in sport can drive broader economic and social development beyond sport.

The authors address the dearth of academic literature on Africa's sport industry, while also inviting more researchers to undertake research agendas that enhance Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a practical implementation blueprint for the attainment of food security for all Nigerians based on sustainable agricultural practices.

This paper conducted a critical review of 66 peer-reviewed empirical articles on various sustainable agricultural case studies. The evidence obtained from this review and the in-depth knowledge of the authors regarding the Nigerian agricultural landscape was used to develop a practical implementation blueprint for achieving food security in the country.

The food security for all Nigerians (FOSFAN) blueprint was developed and comprising of eight practical and interconnected steps. These steps take into consideration the synergistic effort of the government, the ministry of agriculture and its corresponding agencies in ensuring that farmers attain sustainable practices in their endeavour.

The findings of this paper will contribute to existing literature on food security and will also serve as a baseline for deeper empirical exploration of the impact of sustainable agricultural practices on food security in Nigeria (a country in the Sub-Saharan region).

The FOSFAN blueprint provides a practical and comprehensive step-by-step guide, which the Nigerian Ministry of Agriculture can use to achieve food security for all Nigerians.

This paper is addressed towards the development of food security plan in the Nigerian context in which the Nigerian Government ensures the availability of food to all its citizens in a bid to achieve “Zero Hunger”, which is the second Sustainable Development Goal.

The FOSFAN blueprint is a proactive guide that takes into consideration the importance of cultural and socioeconomic nuances in the development of a sustainable agriculture policy in a developing country context.

This study explores value-added food products in smallholder dairy farming in developing countries by analyzing external pressures, supply chain learning, farmer innovation, education level, and food safety compliance.

We employed a quantitative approach by surveying 418 smallholder dairy farmers in three districts of Pakistan using interviewer-administered questionnaires. Data analysis involved confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that external pressure significantly affects value-added smallholder dairy farms. This relationship is mediated by supply chain learning and farmers' innovative behavior, and moderated by farmers' education level and compliance with food safety standards.

Further research is required to explore the drivers of value addition at the supply chain level.

This study contributes to the understanding of smallholder dairy farming dynamics and provides practical implications for improving value addition by managing the interplay between antecedents and promoting best practices in the industry.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into how management accountants can become relevant business partners out of respect for existing locally developed accounts of economic performance for decision-making.

The paper is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with local business actors, in this case, families from seven financially successful Danish dairy farms. The casework and the analysis have been informed by pragmatic constructivism.

The local business actors do not use the official accounting system for ongoing cost-management-related decision-making. Instead, they use several epistemic methods that include locally developed decision models, experiences, rules of thumb and intuition. The farmers use these vernacular accountings to compensate for the cost management illusion that the formal accounting system tends to create. What the study suggests is that when management accountants engage as business partners, they are likely to enter a space where accounting is already present.

This paper argues that local business actors practice epistemic methods where they develop and use vernacular accountings to support their managerial practice, also in the absence of a professional management accountant. These vernacular accountings may lead the local actors into an illusion because the vernacular accountings do not necessarily have an inherent economic logic and theoretical reliability. The role of the management accountant in such a setting is hence to understand, support and advance local epistemic methods. Becoming a business partner requires a combination of management accounting analytical skills and a sense of empathy and sensitivity regarding what is already at play and how this can become an object of discussion without violating the values of the other.

This study aimed to understand coopetition in the context of Brazilian specialty coffee grower Small and medium enterprises (SMEs), based on the need to differentiate the beans in and outside the farm level, taking into account the stakeholders’ influence.

In this study twenty semistructured interviews were carried out with coffee growers and managers of cooperatives, associations and supporting institutions involving two Brazilian coffee geographical indications. Data were analyzed using a mixed grid composed of qualitative, semantic and categorical factors.

Strategic moves undertaken by coffee growers and stakeholders have shaped the pathway of coopetition among coffee growers, as determinants to frame it as a deliberate or emergent pattern (intentional or unplanned, respectively). Our findings provide evidence that coopetition development among firms is deliberate when influenced by firms’ or stakeholders’ cooperative moves and emergent when influenced by firms’ or stakeholders’ competitive moves.

Although the firm/stakeholder relationship is often approached as a joint wealth creation effort, stakes are not always fairly distributed, so one of the parties may be negatively affected, with consequences for the development of coopetition. Underpinned by a stakeholder-oriented resource-based theoretical lens, this investigation of the development patterns of coopetition linked to the strategic actions undertaken by firms and stakeholders has resonance on competitive advantages.

Ghana's economy is largely agrarian, and the business of agriculture is dominated by smallholder farmers who are predominantly rural dwellers. As a result, efforts to lift rural farming households from poverty have been narrowed to the promotion of agricultural development to the neglect of the rural non-farm sector. However, this is fast changing in the advent of a burgeoning rural nonfarm economy and must engage the attention of policy actors. This study thus assesses the effect of non-farm participation on households' level of commercialization of agricultural crops in Ghana.

The study applies a generalized structural equation model (GSEM) to the Ghana Living Standards Survey round 6 dataset, a stratified and nationally representative random sample of 16,772 households in 1,200 enumeration areas.

This study finds that non-farm participation increases the produce sold to output ratio. It is concluded that non-farm engagement by farmers boosts commercialization in Ghana. Thus, for the Ghanaian and similar contexts, agricultural development interventions that incorporate non-farm activities are more likely to be successful in improving livelihoods.

The study uses only the ratio of sales value to output value definition for commercialization and acknowledges use of multiple definitions could be superior.

Various empirical studies have examined the link between the farm and nonfarm sectors. This paper is original in its approach as it tackles an aspect of the subject that has been understudied, namely, an exploration of nonfarm and farm linkages from the perspective of agricultural commercialization.