Model For Food Enterprise Upgrading Strategy To Deal With Food Safety Issues

Food safety issues are happening more and more frequently in China.Chinese food companies have previously coped passively with hazards and accepted the impact of food safety incidents.Pushed by a pressure from domestic consumers becoming more aware of food safety and by a need for resolving barriers to international trade,enterprises now consciously deal with policy changes on food safety,consumer needs and industry adjustments.However Chinese enterprises lack theoretical and practical guidance on how to deal with food safety issues.This thesis reviews three theories of enterprise upgrading,food safety supervisory systems and current status of food safety.A 4-hierarchies model aiming at guiding a food company in coping with food safety problems is constructed to address shortcomings in current theories and practice after two case studies.One case is NWX,a food raw material company,found having the direct response upgrading strategy due to NWX success on leveraging an opportunity arising from the acrylamide food safety issue.The other is MN,a food manufacture who is selected as a case for having the improved response upgrading strategy characteristics as it turned the melamine crisis around by using the company's dynamic capabilities to change its competences.The 4hierarchies by level of drilldown are food safety screening,motivational analysis by food value chain,core competences analysis of the enterprise and dynamic capability analysis of the enterprise.Each hierarchy contains several research propositions.Based on the constructed model and case studies,this thesis draws several conclusions: 1)the response speed towards food safety issues depends on the status of food safety regulations and the span of the issue across food categories,2)the motivation to upgrade the cooperate capabilities to face food issues is smaller if the gap in the value chain between the point where the issue occurs and the point of high economic rent is bigger,3)food enterprise's core competences determine if the food enterprises can utilize the direct response upgrading strategy to deal with food safety issues,4)food companies can utilize the improved response strategy if they do not possess the right core competencies but do have qualified enterprise dynamic capabilities,5)if a company passes the first three levels of assessment,it can utilize the direct response upgrading strategy;otherwise the company needs to utilize orimprove its dynamic capabilities to upgrade current competences and then utilize the improved response strategy to upgrade the enterprise.Limited by number of cases,it is suggested to adjust the measured indexes when using this model.