Food safety incidents’ influence on the food industry

Purpose - – The purposes of this paper are to find out the correlations between the changes of food companies’ environments and the strategic reactions of food companies after the media disclosed that there were food safety incidents out there in the food markets. Design/methodology/approach - – This paper uses a randomly sampling survey of 139 food enterprises in China. After statistical significance and statistical power were examined, canonical correlation analysis was used as the main data analysis technique of this research. Findings - – Based on the environment-strategy paradigm, the authors found that the changes of the competition environment, resource environment, and institution environment in the food industry have significant association with food companies’ strategic reactions such as public relations, networking with firms and futurity after food safety incidents in the food market were disclosed. Originality/value - – The paper is the first to quantitatively examine the relationships between the changes of food companies’ environments and the strategic reactions of food companies after the media disclosed that there were food safety incidents in the food markets. The findings of this paper send novel and important messages to government decision makers and the public, evidencing how food companies strategically respond to external environmental changes, and suggesting that the institution-builder as well as the media have more work to do in the aftermath of food safety incidents.