What Can We Learn from Best Practices Regarding Food Chain Transparency?

Abstract

This paper reports on food chain transparency. The research specifically aims to investigate best practices. Therefore, inductive research was conducted, starting with the identification of best practices. Further, underlying patterns were investigated to derive hypotheses and to develop a theoretical framework. These were confronted with literature findings which resulted in the validation of the hypotheses and the theoretical framework. Overall it can be concluded that several types of food chain transparency exist, whereas the different types represent a hierarchy of transparency domains, and that the basis mainly applies to information quality. In addition, it is shown that performance indicators measure directly or indirectly the success of transparency.