Economic value of traceability: quality strategies in the food industry

The aim of this dossier is to use the case of the agri-food sector to show how traceability can help create economic value.

Today, as economic efficiency is no longer based solely on the ability of economic players to manufacture products at lower cost, competitiveness is based not only on lowering costs, but also on differentiation. In the agri-food sector, for example, manufacturers and distributors have developed their own brands, spreading differentiation strategies through quality signals. For their part, agricultural producers have relied on official quality certifications (AOC or Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée, Label Rouge, etc.) or collective brands. In all cases, the aim is to bring to market an offer similar to that available in the sector, but difficult to compare with that of competitors, so as to be able to set one's own price rather than suffer direct competition through costs and market price. Traceability is often an essential component of differentiation strategies. The challenge is to create value, which translates into a higher price.

In the first part, we'll explain that this value finds its source in quality information, signalled in one way or another (by labelling, packaging, advertising, etc.) to consumers in a cognitive shortcut (a summary of information, a synthetic knowledge or a concentrate of knowledge). More precisely, economic value derives from the relevance, on the one hand, and credibility, on the other, of the quality signal; in both cases, traceability can play a major role. This is what the second part of this dossier seeks to demonstrate.