Sustainable Traceability in the Food Supply Chain: The Impact of Consumer Willingness to Pay

Abstract

This article addresses the sustainable traceability issue in the food supply chain from the sourcing perspective in which consumer willingness to pay for traceability is considered. There are two supplier types: traceable suppliers, which are costly but can carry a precise recall in food safety events, and non-traceable suppliers, which are less expensive but may suffer a higher cost in food safety events. A portion of consumers display traceability consciousness, and are willing to pay a premium for traceable food products. Four possible strategies in a transparent food supply chain and three sourcing strategies in a nontransparent food supply chain are identified and we determine when each strategy is optimal. We show that efforts to improve traceability that focus on consumers, by increasing their willingness to pay for traceability or expanding the portion of traceability consciousness consumers, may lead to an unintended consequence, such as a decrease in the provision of traceable food products. However, efforts that focus on revealing and penalizing the buyer always lead to a higher provision of traceable food products. We further find that efforts focusing on eliminating the information asymmetry may not be helpful for sustainable traceability in the food supply chain.

Mapping Sustainable Tomato Supply Chain in Greece: A Framework for Research

“…Thus, mapping reveals the pivotal role of the consumer in any research for and implementation of a successful traceability system. In agreement with previous studies [70,71] exploring consumer acceptance of a traceability system and their willingness to pay a price premium on the final products, this should be among the priorities of future research.…”

“…Further analysis and discussion of the findings in the previous section, resulted in specific recommendations for the Greek tomato supply chain and consequently for the entire Greek agri-food sector. The underlined difference between the proposed focus on traceability and any other similar recommendations in the same direction (there are plenty in the last decade, see for example [67,69,70]), is the actual linkage with the social pillar of sustainability and most importantly with a consumer-centric supply chain orientation. Solely investigating the consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) in relation to traceability does not provide as extensive insights as the advised suggestion in the current work; the end-to-end exploration of consumers understanding, including WTP, is linked to all stages of the supply chain, taking into consideration the social sustainability impact.…”

Development of IoT based data-driven agriculture supply chain performance measurement framework

“…The literature on sustainability issues in ASC can be grouped into three major parts namely., the issue of carbon emission (environmental aspects of TBL) comes under deliver phase of SCOR model of performance (Miranda-Ackerman and Azzaro-Pantel, 2017), wasting of food (economical aspect of TBL) comes under make, deliver and source phase (Irani and Sharif, 2016;Sgarbossa and Russo, 2017) and agri product quality (economical and social aspects of TBL) and security of the food products within entire ASC/organic farming (social and economic aspects of TBL) comes under mainly make and deliver phase (Sun et al, 2017). Further, minimization of the transportation and SC network design costs (economic aspects of TBL) comes under deliver phase (Musavi and Bozorgi-Amiri, 2017).…”

Applying blockchain technology to improve agri-food traceability: A review of development methods, benefits and challenges

“…The food chain needs to become more sustainable in order to improve consumers' trust and purchase willingness. Tracking and authenticating the information throughout the whole food supply chain is critical for identifying and addressing sources of contamination, which contributes to sustainability management in agri-food chains (Galvez et al, 2018;Olsen et al, 2018, Zhao et al, 2017Sun et al, 2017;Bosona et al, 2013). Traditional Internet of Things (IoT) traceability systems can monitor and store the specific information in all stages of production, processing, distribution and consumption by using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, etc.…”