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Since several food crises have strongly affected the production of animal food products, food safety has become one of the most important aspects of quality products for both consumers and retailers. The aim of this article is to analyse how the health crises have contributed to increasing the segmentation of the supply of fresh and little‐processed food products under the impetus of a reinforcement of regulations (affecting the supply chain as a whole) and of strategies adopted by the stakeholders.

The authors carry out an empirical and comparative analysis of the reactions of two neighbouring countries (Spain and France) faced with major health crises caused by similar events: the emergence of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) cases. A special focus is made on the initiatives taken privately by two French retail groups (Carrefour and Auchan) operating in both countries.

The analysis shows that retailers have developed systems of quality insurance developed in order to reduce uncertainty and to restore consumers' confidence in the quality of the products they buy. These programmes of actions pave the way for policies of product differentiation. In a relatively different context from that of France, the two big French retail groups Carrefour and Auchan operating in Spain have developed similar approaches, which had not been the case in France. In a context of sharp competition between quality designation on the one hand, and the relative dissatisfaction of the retailer with respect to “minimum quality” standards on the other, the two groups have adopted marketing communication strategies adapted to the Spanish situation, and have used “supply chain brands” as tools of differentiation to ensure consumers' loyalty.

Provides an analysis of the effects of health crises on the segmentation of the supply of fresh food products.

Analyses the likely impact of the recent bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis on the organization of the UK beef supply chain. Using concepts from New Institutional Economics, argues that, in addition to the direct financial costs of the crisis, additional hidden transaction costs and long‐term “transaction benefits” should be considered. Hidden costs include the increased need for monitoring and traceability in the supply chain, while hidden benefits may result from a reorientation of the industry towards a more consumer‐driven focus, a greater attention to food safety issues and opportunities for branding and market segmentation. It is suggested that the hidden transaction costs and benefits are likely to lead to closer vertical co‐ordination throughout the beef supply chain.

With recent shifts in market forces driven by food safety and quality concerns, managers in the Brazilian beef processing industry are forced to reevaluate their procurement arrangements with cattle producers. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight on the effect of live-weight (LW) and dead-weight (DW) procurement arrangements on farmers’ incentives to invest in cattle quality.

The research methods involve a conceptual model based on principal-agent framework and data from targeted interviews of cattle farmers and slaughterhouse managers in the Western Region of São Paulo state of Brazil.

Findings highlight the potential for adverse selection of low-quality cattle producers under LW arrangement and misaligned incentives for quality improvement, they also illustrate incentive compatibility of DW arrangement when the carcass yield is verifiable by producers. The evidence from field data was largely consistent with the predictions of the model and highlighted the important role of trust for a lasting procurement relationship under DW arrangement.

Due to the lack of publicly available data and the challenges associated with the collection of primary field data, the sample is limited to 30 cattle producers and 5 processing firms.

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical platform for developing further research on coordination at the producer–processor interface of beef supply chain in Brazil and other countries with similar transaction characteristics. The findings will assist in designing more incentive compatible and self-enforcing arrangements between cattle farmers and slaughterhouses to enhance the product quality and the overall efficiency of the supply chain.

The purpose of this paper is to explore drivers of alliance formation in a specialized supply chain from a manager’s perspective, focussing on firm-specific resources, resources embedded in inter-firm relationships and capabilities under the control of the focal firm.

This paper focusses on the resource-based view to obtain insights from the analysis of a manager survey conducted in Canada’s beef sector, applying a logistic regression approach to study alliance formation.

In identifying significant roles for resource richness and diversification of resource usage, the analysis highlights the importance of resource characteristics underlying factor market imperfections as drivers of alliance formation in a single primary input supply chain. The results suggest that resource heterogeneity is important for alliance formation and organizational success in specialized supply chains.

If previous alliance-related experience of managers, controlled for in the underlying cross-sectional survey, serves as an approximation for persistent unobservables impacting the alliance formation decision, we may face spurious state-dependence.

Managers interested in building compatible alliances in specialized single primary input supply chains may benefit from an improved understanding of the differential role of resource characteristics and resource heterogeneity for alliance formation, as these can function as a source of competitive advantage.

The analysis provides new insights from an individual manager’s perspective on alliance formation drivers in a specialized agri-food supply chain, thereby solidifying extant findings on alliance formation obtained in other sectors. The study contributes to the understanding of the role of resources in alliance formation with regard to prior relationship experience, resource heterogeneity and thus causal ambiguity, thereby also contributing to the debate of the role of relational capabilities vs firm-internal resources for sustained competitive advantage.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the attitudes and experiences of Scottish farmers in marketing their beef and sheep, and the nature of their marketing relationships. As such, it seeks to identify the challenges that the recently revised Forward Strategy for Scottish Agriculture may face with respect to the wider establishment of collaborative supply chains and the strengthening of links between beef and sheep farmers and other parts of the meat supply chain.

The approach involved a postal survey of beef and sheep producers throughout Scotland, with a sample which was representative in terms of regional and farm size distribution. In total 1,778 questionnaires were mailed, with a response rate of 34 per cent (n=611). In addition, interviews were held with major meat processors and retailers in order to provide a “reality check” for the information from the survey.

The results from the survey show that there are low levels of customer awareness amongst farmers in the red meat chain, and low levels of trust of other chain participants, particularly in relation to price.

The wisdom of developing collaborative supply chains is widely acknowledged throughout the European Union (EU), but such moves need an understanding of the attitudes and circumstances of the various supply chain participants. This paper is of value to practitioners (government, consultants and academia) as it highlights empirical issues that may hamper the development of collaborative supply chains.

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically, an industry development paradox, using embryonic literature in the area of strategic supply chain management, together with innovation management literature. This study seeks to understand how, forming strategic supply chain relationships, and developing strategic supply chain capability, influences beneficial supply chain outcomes expected from utilizing industry-led innovation, in the form of electronic business solutions using the internet, in the Australian beef industry. Findings should add valuable insights to both academics and practitioners in the fields of supply chain innovation management and strategic supply chain management, and expand knowledge to current literature.

This is a quantitative study comparing innovative and non-innovative supply chain operatives in the Australian beef industry, through factor analysis and structural equation modeling using PAWS Statistical V18 and AMOS V18 to analyze survey data from 412 respondents from the Australian beef supply chain.

Key findings are that both innovative and non-innovative supply chain operators attribute supply chain synchronization as only a minor indicator of strategic supply chain capability, contrary to the literature; and they also indicate strategic supply chain capability has a minor influence in achieving beneficial outcomes from utilizing industry-led innovation. These results suggest a lack of coordination between supply chain operatives in the industry. They also suggest a lack of understanding of the benefits of developing a strategic supply chain management competence, particularly in relation to innovation agendas, and provides valuable insights as to why an industry paradox exists in terms of the level of investment in industry-led innovation, vs the level of corresponding benefit achieved.

Results are not generalized due to the single agribusiness industry studied and the single research method employed. However, this provides opportunity for further agribusiness studies in this area and also studies using alternate methods, such as qualitative, in-depth analysis of these factors and their relationships, which may confirm results or produce different results. Further, this study empirically extends existing theoretical contributions and insights into the roles of strategic supply chain management and innovation management in improving supply chain and ultimately industry performance while providing practical insights to supply chain practitioners in this and other similar agribusiness industries.

These findings confirm results from a 2007 research (Ketchen et al., 2007) which suggests supply chain practice and teachings need to take a strategic direction in the twenty-first century. To date, competence in supply chain management has built up from functional and process orientations rather than from a strategic perspective. This study confirms that there is a need for more generalists that can integrate with various disciplines, particularly those who can understand and implement strategic supply chain management.

Possible social implications accrue through the development of responsible government policy in terms of industry supply chains. Strategic supply chain management and supply chain innovation management have impacts to the social fabric of nations through the sustainability of their industries, especially agribusiness industries which deal with food safety and security. If supply chains are now the competitive weapon of nations then funding innovation and managing their supply chain competitiveness in global markets requires a strategic approach from everyone, not just the industry participants.

This is original empirical research, seeking to add value to embryonic and important developing literature concerned with adopting a strategic approach to supply chain management. It also seeks to add to existing literature in the area of innovation management, particularly through greater understanding of the implications of nations developing industry-wide, industry-led innovation agendas, and their ramifications to industry supply chains.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how first-tier suppliers in multi-tier supply chains adapt their vertical and horizontal relationships to reduce the risk of slavery-like practices.

Using Archer’s morphogenetic theory as an analytical lens, this paper presents case analyses adduced from primary and secondary data related to the development of relational anti-slavery supply capabilities in Brazilian–UK beef and timber supply chains.

Four distinct types of adaptation were found among first-tier suppliers: horizontal systemisation, vertical systemisation, horizontal transformation and vertical differentiation.

This study draws attention to the socially situated nature of corporate action, moving beyond the rationalistic discourse that underpins existing research studies of multi-tier, socially sustainable, supply chain management. Cross-sector comparison highlights sub-country and intra-sectoral differences in both institutional setting and the approaches and outcomes of individual corporate actors’ initiatives. Sustainable supply chain management theorists would do well to seek out those institutional entrepreneurs who actively reshape the institutional conditions within which they find themselves situated.

Practitioners may benefit from adopting a structured approach to the analysis of the necessary or contingent complementarities between their, primarily economic, objectives and the social sustainability goals of other, potential, organizational partners.

A range of interventions that may serve to reduce the risk of slavery-like practices in global commodity chains are presented.

This paper presents a novel analysis of qualitative empirical data and extends understanding of the agential role played by first-tier suppliers in global, multi-tier, commodity, supply chains.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate cow-calf producer incentive to adopt innovations in traits with important environmental and economic implications for the beef supply chain.

A whole farm multi-year farm optimization model that tracks changes in discounted net returns and methane emissions from the use of newer DNA-related technologies to breed for feed efficient cattle is developed. The analysis is situated within the context of whole beef cattle supply chain. This allows for the derivation of the entire value and environmental impact of the innovation, and the decomposition of value by different participants. The impact of different policies that can stimulate producer uptake and the diffusion of the innovation is also addressed.

The results of the study showed that whilst the use of the breeding technology yielded positive economic and environmental benefits to all producers in the supply chain, primary adopters were unlikely to adopt. This paper finds evidence of the misalignment in incentives within the supply chain with a significant proportion of the additional value going to producers who do not incur any additional cost from the adoption of the innovation. The study also highlighted the role of both public and market-based mechanisms in the innovation diffusion process.

This paper is unique as it is the first study that addresses producer incentive to adopt genomic selection for feed efficiency across the entire beef cattle supply chain, and incorporates both economic and environmental outcomes.

This study aims to identify halal risk events, halal risk agents, measure halal risk level and formulate the halal risk control model (mitigation) in all stages in the beef supply chain from Australia to Indonesia.

This research combines qualitative and quantitative method. It elaborates nine variables as the Halal Control Point: halal animal, animal welfare, stunning, knife, slaughter person, slaughter method, invocation, packaging, labeling and halal meat. This study uses house of risk, a model for proactive supply chain risk.

The main mitigation strategies to guarantee the halal beef status in the abattoir is the obligation of vendor or the factory to issue a written manual of stunning tool. The priority of halal risk mitigation strategies for the retailing to avoid the meat contamination is the need of a halal policy for transporter’s companies and supermarkets.

Every actor must be strongly committed to the application of halal risk mitigation strategies and every chain must be implemented in the halal assurance system.

This model will be a good reference for halal meat auditing and reference for halal meat import procurement policy.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the forms of coordinating transactions used by a large beef slaughterhouse and processing companies and their suppliers of beef cattle, and to identify the reasons for the adoption of plural forms of governance for their transactions with cattle suppliers.

A case study format was selected for this investigation. The focal company selected offers a large number of products derived from beef for different commercialisation channels in the domestic and foreign market. A non-probability sample of 30 suppliers (cattle farmers) of the focal company provided data on finished steers sold in 2010, according to the three types of governance used in the transactions (spot market, forward contracts and long-term contracts).

The simultaneous use of more than one type of governance structure to coordinate similar transactions has been termed plural forms of governance in the literature. In Brazil, new forms of governance, such as formal and informal contracts, have been adopted for transactions between beef processing companies and cattle farmers, in addition to the use of spot market and vertical integration. It has been shown that the adoption of plural forms reduces the risk of complex transactions; and is a strategy to deal with unpredictable institutional environments and high heterogeneity of both suppliers and distribution channels.

The research provides empirical evidence of plural forms of governance, as well as the reasons for the adoption of this strategy by firms, which contributes to the ongoing theoretical discussion on this subject.

The paper has implications for company supply chain management.

This paper presents theoretical review on plural forms of governance, new empirical evidence and determinant factors for their adoption.