An Economic Evaluation of Food Safety Education Interventions: Estimates and Critical Data Gaps

How Do Spillover Effects Influence the Food Safety Strategies of Companies? New Orientation of Regulations for Food Safety

The food safety strategies of companies are a key point in the reduction of food safety risks. In order to encourage the evolution of food safety strategies of companies from food fraud to safety investment, this study builds an evolutionary game model, taking large and small companies as participants, to reveal the dynamic process of spillover effects influencing the choice of food safety strategies of companies. The study shows that (1) the food safety strategies of companies change from safety investment to food fraud, along with the increasing opportunity costs of safety investment. (2) The costs structure of small companies mainly determines whether the industry reaches the equilibrium of safety investment, while the costs structure of large companies mainly determines whether the industry reaches the equilibrium of food fraud. (3) Both competition effects and contagion effects encourage companies to choose safety investment. The more obvious spillover effects of incidents on food safety are, the more likely it is that companies will choose safety investments. (4) Increasing the costs to companies for incidents on food safety and reducing the opportunity cost of safety investment motivates companies to choose safety investment. Consequently, a new orientation of regulations for food safety is formed: the government should allocate different regulatory resources to counteract food fraud behaviors or technologies with a different benefit, should increase the technical costs and costs incurred from committing acts of food fraud, and should expand spillover effects of incidents on food safety.

Consumers´ awareness of food safety

Eating food is one of the most important needs of every person, so their safety and quality should be crucial for everyone. People expect, that food they eat is hygienically and health safe. Unfortunately, people usually start to focus on food safety only when various food scandals are exposed and it is too late. Mass consumption of food is the cause of a high risk to human health, but only in the case of harmful food. Food-borne diseases are a common and widespread phenomenon in all parts of the world, regardless of the economic development of the country. Protection of human, animal and plant health is one of the main economic priorities of each country. The political objective of the European Union is therefore to ensure that European Union citizens have access to safe and nutritious foods, so it must meet strict safety standards. In ensuring food safety, it is necessary to take into account all aspects of the food production chain as a whole, because each subject can have a potential impact on food safety. This paper deals with the issues of food safety and food quality. The main objective was to find out how consumers perceive higher quality food and whether they read information included on the food packaging. Primary data were obtained from a survey that was conducted on the sample of 478 respondents living in Slovakia. For a deeper analysis, several assumptions, which were verified by Friedman Test, Chi-Square Test of Independence, Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test, were formulated. The survey has found out that 84% of respondents buy higher quality food and 60% purchase them because of health-related reasons. More than half of respondents search for the information about food safety on the Internet and the same percentage considere government as the most reliable source of information about food safety. Unfortunately, just more than one quarter of them read the information on food label and for 34% is this information unsufficient.