Abstract

“Risk associated with compromising of food product safety have traditionally been associated with ‘harm to health’, however ‘harm to emotion or beliefs’ has emerged as another dimension with the recent UK’s horsemeat scandal. Ensuring food product safety is one of the important industrial challenges, particularly when products are sourced from extended international supply chains involving a complex network of actors. Furthermore, in extended food supply chains involving production activities in developing countries, the understanding of risk mitigation practices is not well understood. In this paper we aim to investigate food safety risk and mitigation practices followed by food manufacturers based in developing countries and involved in a cross border supply. The study builds on Roth et al (2008) ‘Six Ts’ framework for food quality management and integrates it with Srai and Gregory (2008) ‘supply network configuration’ approach to understand a set of food safety risk mitigation practices in cross border supply chains. The ‘Six Ts’ framework, developed to promote food quality management in supply chains based in developing countries, is applied across a set of supply network configuration dimensions to explore risks in structure, process flow dynamics, and governance. The research provides a novel analytical approach to evaluate food safety risk and vulnerabilities emerging from the configuration of global food supply chains, and developing a broader set of mitigation practices.”