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The increasing frequency with which food and beverage producers feature in mainstream media, including television cooking shows, provide opportunities and pitfalls for using media to promote artisan food and beverage businesses. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate these, as experienced by a group of food and beverage producers who appeared on the popular Australian television show, Gourmet Farmer.

Findings are based on semi-structured interviews with 14 of the producers featured on the show, plus textual analysis of relevant segments of the show.

While all of the producers felt that food television offered a good promotional tool, those who were most familiar with the practices of media production and whose businesses offered experiences through which viewers could access (or imagine) a “taste” of the Gourmet Farmer life tended to be more satisfied than those who were less familiar with the practices of media production and who expected a greater focus on their products and production practices.

The development of media skills is essential for artisan producers to get the best outcomes when using media to promote their businesses.

The experiences of food and beverage producers using food television to promote their businesses have not previously been the subject of thoroughgoing research. This paper offers new insights into how artisan producers can best capitalize on the opportunities offered by food media.

The authors examine issues related to farm‐to‐table direct marketing. We consider motivations and drawbacks associated with participating in farm‐to‐table from both the consumer and farmer perspectives. While we find a significant amount of advocacy for the restoration of nostalgic methods of food distribution that remove all intermediaries from direct farmer‐consumer interaction, we conclude that farm‐to‐table direct marketing plays, and is likely to continue to play, a very minor role in US food distribution.

Today, governance of food safety and quality as well as environmental aspects of food chains increasingly operates through public and private standards. This governance, as led by retail power, is often interpreted to undermine farmer’s agrarian independence by dictating detailed agricultural practices on the farm, thereby conditioning access into the food chain. Focusing on farmers’ discursive resources, agrarian writing implies an alternative social force, constructed here as farmer’s freedom. By analysing qualitative data from Finland along the theoretical axes of farmers’ interest in socio-economic achievement and willingness to comply with standards, a more nuanced understanding of farmers’ occupational freedom emerges. Freedom in economic interests and organic farming represents farmers as standard takers as standards supported values most important for them. Realizing freedom in economic creativity can be antagonistic to (public) standards and lead to contestations and negotiations for feasibility. Finally, freedom in self-sufficiency is antithetical to the commercial food chain; however, dissenting from standards displays a strong capacity to close the metabolic rift, along with organic farming. The evidence from the study suggests that farmers’ freedom has the character of a social force to modify food chains and to increase their socio-economic and environmental sustainability and to call for consumers’ freedom to join farmers’ efforts.

This paper aims to share the findings of a study of self-declared “foodies”. In particular this paper provides a demographic and socio-economic profile of the sample and their behavioural and travel preferences.

An online survey was designed, incorporating existing literature. It was administered to a population of foodies in Australia. Data is analysed using SPSS®.

Key results suggest food tourists are mostly female, well-educated and generally affluent. They seek diverse, regional and authentic yet tactile rather than passive experiences, and are willing to travel for food (and drink) complemented by cultural and sightseeing activities.

The geographic scope of this study is limited and the volume of data yielded from the study inhibits efforts to report all findings in a compact paper; the implication being future analysis and research is required.

This study provides valuable insights to destination marketers seeking to niche food tourists.

This study demographically and socio-behaviourally profiles foodies and provides insights into the domestic travel behaviours.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the field of hospitality management and a guide to the major books, databases, web sites, and other resources that comprise a quality hospitality management reference collection.

Following a short introduction and overview, key sources and annotations are presented in categories that will help reference and collection librarians to better understand and serve hospitality management students. The sources were identified through the author's experience, library research guides and web sites, bibliographies, and other standard sources.

Hospitality management is growing and maturing as an academic discipline, aided by the fact that the field offers good job prospects. The key sources pertaining to hospitality management are scattered among several different industry sectors, including food and beverage, lodging, meetings and special events, travel and tourism, and theme parks and attractions.

This paper is the first to systematically identify key reference works for the field of hospitality management. It will be useful for librarians who work with business, culinary arts, hospitality management, or related fields.

This chapter offers a theoretical appraisal of our contemporary hyper-regulated urban spaces situated against a backdrop of deindustrialisation, the shift to consumer economies and the rise of the creative city paradigm. While existing work has characterised urban space as dead and asocial spaces bereft of life. This chapter opts to think our city centres as ‘Zombie Cities’: cities which have been eviscerated the social but are forced to wear the exterior signs of life through the injection of economically productive but artificial modes of culture and creativity. This sets the stage for explaining why parkour is inconsistently included and excluded from urban space, and how it attains spatio-economically contingent legitimacy and inclusion into urban space that problematises existing theoretical perspectives around a revanchist urbanism.

Murrah Dairy Company Limited (Murrah Dairy) is a strategy and management case related to entrepreneurship, with a focus on marketing, expansion, strategy and management of a family-run small and medium enterprise (SME).

The case is suitable for senior undergraduate and/or graduate MBA strategic management, entrepreneurship and marketing courses.

The case is about Murrah Dairy, Thailand's first and only buffalo dairy producer. The company combines the concepts of regular SMEs together with community enterprises to build a business that can be used to achieve community benefits as well as private gains. With 11 years of experience, Murrah Dairy remains the first and only extensive dairy buffalo farm in Thailand. The market is growing, the brand is catching on and the company keeps expanding. Beginning with Murrah Farm in 2003, now Murrah Dairy now operates Murrah Farm, Murrah House and Mini Murrah Farm. The question now is where to go from here and what will it take to grow?

The expected learning outcomes are the increases in understanding on environment assessment (such as SWOT analysis, Porter's Five Forces, success factors), marketing strategy (product portfolio analysis, market-product analysis) and SME management, as well as abilities to propose growth strategies and marketing strategies for the firm.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

The paper seeks to explore the importance of a sample of New Zealand farmers' markets in providing a supportive setting for the take‐off as well as the decline stage of the small business life cycle, with a view to identifying factors that may enhance rural small business survivability.

The task was achieved by use of a combination of interviews and case studies. A list of new generation farmers' markets was compiled. Managers from four of these markets were interviewed to identify the possible existence of businesses that had been fostered by, but had now outgrown, the market. Four incubated businesses were selected from one of the longer established markets. From a more recently established market, 18 stallholders were selected for examination of their attitudes towards the market as a nurturing environment in relation to the life‐cycle stage of the business. Data were analysed using qualitative techniques of theme identification and analysis.

It was found that farmers' markets can have a role as small business incubators and safety nets, thus enhancing the survival chances of rural small businesses. This may be particularly useful where dwindling government subsidies and growing supermarket power result in declining incomes and reduced outlets for small‐scale farmers and rural producers.

The research findings are limited by the non‐random nature of the sampling procedure. In such an exploratory study, the main emphasis was on establishing the existence of the incubator and safety net functions. Further research is needed to establish the extent of these roles.

The research investigates a relatively unique setting of an unsubsidised agricultural sector.

This chapter examines changes in smallholder agriculture in terms of processes of de-agrarianization in a rapidly changing regional economy of Costa Rica long characterized by small-scale commercial coffee farming.

The study is based on multiple periods (1990–1991, 1993, 2006, 2010–2012) of ethnographic research on household economic strategies among farming families in two districts in the canton of Pérez Zeledón, Costa Rica.

Though occupational multiplicity and non-farm-based livelihoods are on the rise, smallholder agriculture continues to play a substantial role in the livelihood strategies of both young and old and in the regional economy, not in spite of these trends, but because an expanding business sector and an increase in non-farm employment opportunities are creating a demand for agricultural produce and providing new opportunities for smallholders to diversify agricultural production, stabilize their incomes and maintain a significant presence in the regional economy. Specific historic conditions and state policies have been important factors in shaping rural economic change, livelihood strategies and smallholder agriculture in this region.

Sample sizes are relatively small and some data on children’s economic activities were obtained second hand from siblings and/or parents.

This research has implications for policy makers, planners and social activists interested in agrarian change.

This research provides an important longitudinal lens on the economic strategies of farming households, processes of de-agrarianization and the persistence of small-scale family farmers in today’s world.

A trend toward higher quality has demanded more strategic investments in the transaction of coffee supply in Brazil. Instead of internalizing this transaction, one firm, illycaffè, has challenged the vertical integration assumption by adopting contracts to coordinate its supply. Aiming to investigate whether this firm is losing economic efficiency in terms of coordination, or whether it is being efficient due to a proper definition and allocation of property and decision rights, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the transaction attributes of illycaffè’s suppliers according to the vertical integration dilemma.

The research design is based on a survey of 105 coffee growers analyzed through probit regression. Using a transaction costs approach, the study empirically tests whether well-designed contracts can act as a hierarchy by following the efficient alignment hypothesis.

The results emphasize asset specificity, uncertainty and incentives as determinants for being an illycaffè supplier. In other words, these findings demonstrate that a well-designed contract can substitute a hierarchy based on transaction costs economics. It contributes by illustrating other coordination alternatives overlapping vertical integration, even in environments of high uncertainty and asset specificity, which encourages other private strategies based on allocation of property and decision rights of hybrid arrangements.

The study adopts a unique survey about transaction costs in the transactions of high-quality coffee supply in Brazil. The main contribution is to shed light on the cases where, how and why contracts can substitute the need for in-house production, and to guide private and public strategies using this background.