Mechanisms of food safety and quality regulation. / Mecanismos da regulação da qualidade e segurança em alimentos.

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2003

RESUMO

The guarantee of the good quality of food is a growing focus of governments, companies and the international standardization, certification and trade agents. Their efforts are addressed to influence the consumer s perception over the many attributes of a food product, with special attention to the nutrition and safety attributes. The warranty of quality is overcoming in prominence because the attributes of quality are being better appraised by governments, consumers and companies. This better evaluation suggests the emersion of more proportionate voluntary quality warranties by companies and more regulation by the government. The formal and informal mechanisms have been analyzed in general, separately on marketing and regulation literature. The analysis of the interaction among these mechanisms provides conflicting and extreme visions like the reputation being substituted by the regulation needs, in the cases where exclusively the action of the government is defended as enough, and other, where the performance of the state is unnecessary due to the consumer s trust in the reputation of the brand or organization. A third vision happens when the regulation is complemented with the use of private strategies of reputation on the product or organization and vice versa. The main goal of this study was to analyze the complementarity and substitution relationship between the formal and informal mechanisms related to food safety based on the bovine meat consumer s perception. The model proposed was generated from the framework of game theory and of the hedonic demand analysis of attributes. Nine hypothetical products were generated starting from an orthogonal matrix of a group of twenty-seven possible combinations of three different intensities of knowledge on the brand (informal mechanism), monitoring (formal mechanism) and price. The research was conducted with 591 consumers in the city of Piracicaba, Brazil. The consumers were interviewed in their residences and in the butchery and retail stores. They organized these hypothetical products in their order of preference on those that provide a higher or smaller perception of safety and quality. Using the technique of conjoint analysis, the importance given by the consumer for the intensity of monitoring was of 42.05% and for the brand knowledge intensity was 28.9%. The preference for the levels of these attributes was growing with their increase, the growing order preference was the levels “without brand”, “less known brand” and “well known brand” and for the monitoring the “absence of monitoring”, “eventual monitoring” and “intensive monitoring.” The importance attributed to the price was 29.66%. The medium level was the most favorite (R$ 12.00), followed by the lower (R$ 8,00) and the higher (R$ 16,00). That could mean a trade-off in favor of a lower price and a dissociation of these attribute as an element of a high quality perception. Only 7.1% of the interviewees affirm that the price contributed to a higher perception of the high product quality while for the intensive monitoring was 73.6%. It was not possible to identify consumers segments with different behaviors and preferences. The Ordered Probit model and the Poisson regression model were used to analyze the complementarity and substitution relationship. Between brand and monitoring, maintaining the price constant, the perception of the product quality by the consumer is significantly higher when there is a concomitant increase of the intensity of knowledge on the brand and on the intensity of the monitoring in relation to an exclusive increase of each those mechanisms. It was also verified that complementarity is significantly higher from a low level to a medium level than from a medium level to a high level. Concerning complementarity between price and monitoring, maintaining the intensity of knowledge about the constant brand, the complementarity was also verified but in a smaller level of significance. Public policies and private strategies that improve the quality perception of the consumer s quality regarding meat consumption were suggested. Due to the small geographical scope of the data analyzed, other studies conducted in other places can prove the complementarity or not of those mechanisms, and capture regional differences. Applications of this model to other problems that involve private and public strategies combined, as the environmental issues, can be also useful.

ASSUNTO(S)

consumer alimentos regulação regulation food consumidor

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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