Towards the Development of Innovative Strategies for Traditional Food Chains in the EU

Traditional food products (TFPs) represent an important part of each European Member State’s cultural heritage and provide critical economic inputs to many regions via their production and sale. Nevertheless, a major challenge for the traditional food sector is to improve its competitiveness by applying innovations while at the same time maintaining traditionalism. Therefore, modernization of all aspects of the traditional food sector is necessary with special emphasis on the integrity of chains (EC, 2007). This illustrates a need for a chain strategy for the traditional food sector in the EU. Despite this recognition, the actual development of such chain strategies lags behind because of some particular issues which still needs to be addressed (e.g. vision, mission, values or action plans). This paper focuses on three key bottlenecks in relation to the development of a chain vision for the European traditional food sector, namely 1) integrating chain members’ goals, 2) selecting a minimum set of key goals and 3) balancing between rational and intuitive thinking. We refer to a chain as a set of three directly connected organizations (supplier, focal company, customer) being involved in the upstream and downstream flows of products, services, finances, information and/or knowledge adapted from Mentzer et al. (2001). The three directly connected organizations (supplier, focal company, customer) are referred as chain members in the rest of the article. A chain vision can be defined as the a statement of the desired future state of the chains being subject of chain vision development adapted from Raynor (1998).