Research On Credit System Of Food Service Industry’s Food Safety

As Chinese market economy gradually mature, food services (FS) industry is booming at an unprecedented speed, and becomes the growth driver of economy. However, as the continuous outbreak of food safety incidents becomes a new issue within industry, dishonest behavior such as adding illegal ingredients, manufacturing and selling counterfeit goods, caused great panic among consumers. With the asymmetric information between producer and consumer, integrity in FS is raised by consumers. Hence, the government urgently needs system such as food material traceability, credit evaluation and disciplinary mechanism, while they should be combined with the "Four in One" food safety regulatory system including corporate self-regulation, government supervision, self-protection of consumers and social supervision to further enhance the sense of responsibility and integrity from catering services industry, as well as to improve the FS industry food safety credit system. This paper intends to discuss how to establish basic framework and operational mechanism of food safety credit system, strengthen the construction of Shanghai food safety credit system safeguard measures and countermeasures research to establish and standardize the FS market economic order, reduce the corporate transaction cost, improve the efficiency of the food safety supervision, enhance the consumer’s trust on food market, and solve the integrity issue brought up by overheated economy.Theoretical foundation of this paper is mainly based on the Public Product and the Game theory. It also defines and analyzes the concept of the food safety, its credit system and relevant connotations and implications. Then with the research into relevant literature, it make clear the historical track record on the construction of Chinese Food Safety Credit System as well as the experience of foreign FS credit system building. Through the details of case from Shanghai J district that builds the credit system, it will throw light on the big picture regarding the problems of existing Shanghai FS industry food safety credit system. For example:the absence of unified credit evaluation mechanism, unrewarding consequence of disciplinary mechanism without legal system support, below-average detection level, the difficulty of regulation due to the fact that illegal behavior is hard to trace. In the end, by the lessons from domestic and international FS credit system construction and experience, it suggest to build a set of replicable supervision mechanism, which is able to be applied to the catering and service industry of food safety credit system. The supervision mechanism includes five fundamental parts:tracing mechanism, first responsibility mechanism, the credit management mechanism, rewards and punishment mechanism.