315: Who Really Has the Final Say on Quality?

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‘315’ is the shorthand for Consumer Rights Day. Every year on this date, people instinctively focus on which frauds have been exposed by CCTV. In daily life, however, a product’s value exists in more than just a binary of ‘real’ or ‘fake’; consumers also care about quality and whether they are truly getting value for money. In the view of Dr Li Shumeng, a researcher in economic sociology, quality is not an inherent concept, but one shaped by various social groups and factors. To understand the quality of a product, one must consider who holds the discourse power to define that quality and how such power is established. How can consumers truly reclaim this power? What forces are undermining or even stripping it away? In this article, Shumeng uses food as a case study to outline the struggle for discourse power within food consumption.

For more discussions on consumer rights, click the link: 315: Beyond waiting for fraud exposures, how can consumers distinguish the ‘real’ thing?

I. The Formation of the Value Chain

How do consumers perceive the quality of a particular product or service? My interest in this question stems from a long-standing focus in my research: how do we define the value of a specific type of labour or skill? As consumers, we all want to feel that what we pay for is worth the cost. Consequently, understanding what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘worthy’ quality directly influences every consumption decision we make. Regarding food, most consumers first want it to be safe, and secondly, to be tasty. But where do our concepts of ‘safety’ and ‘taste’ come from, and what factors influence them?

● In a Shunde wet market, there is no information regarding the quality of vegetables other than the price, but there is little to no price premium to speak of. Image source: Foodthink

On a technical level, origin and production methods have the most direct impact on safety and flavour. However, most consumers lack in-depth knowledge of these aspects. Instead, it is various marketing narratives that most directly shape the consumer’s perception of quality. For example, the same batch of fruit sourced from the Xinfadi wholesale market can be sold at a higher price in a premium supermarket than in a local community greengrocer. This is simply because the former creates a consumption environment that communicates and reinforces the notion that ‘more expensive and more refined equals better quality’, and consumers implicitly accept that fruit here should be more expensive than at a wet market.

This is an inevitable result of the mainstream market structure. Under a high degree of division of labour, countless intermediaries stand between the food producer and the consumer, making it difficult for the consumer to understand what is happening at the production end. This information asymmetry gives intermediaries greater discourse power to influence how consumers perceive a product. This forms a long value chain: while the basic form of the food remains unchanged, every intermediary adds value through extra packaging and marketing. Aside from necessary costs such as transport, storage, and sales, a portion of the price the consumer pays is essentially paying for these marketing narratives.

● The Yau Ma Tei Fruit Market in Hong Kong is a renowned imported fruit market, where fruits from all over the world naturally command high prices; there is even a prestige hierarchy based on the origin and variety of Japanese strawberries. Image source: Foodthink

Such a power structure is hardly fair to consumers or small-scale farmers. For consumers, we are more likely to be led by the nose by marketing jargon, finding it harder to form our own experiences and lacking the confidence to challenge these narratives. Meanwhile, small producers, lacking the funds and energy for marketing, are unable to showcase the knowledge and skills applied on the production line.

Take the coffee flavour wheel, which Foodthink has discussed previously, as an example. In the industry rules established by the Specialty Coffee Association, coffee beans are classified and graded by aroma, and certain production regions are praised for producing beans with specific scents. However, these aromatic definitions are based on the olfactory standards of the American industrial food system. Who would have thought that the ‘peach’ note on the coffee flavour wheel is actually benchmarked against peach-flavoured jelly?! (A Foodthink author from the Lingnan region, while studying gastronomy in Italy, discovered that the ‘lychee’ note in coffee is closer to the taste of canned lychees than to any variety of fresh lychee she was familiar with.)

● Many are familiar with the authoritative coffee flavour wheel, but few know that the standard flavours are mostly benchmarked against processed foods familiar to Americans, such as jams and juices, rather than fresh ingredients. Image: World Coffee Research

At the same time, most of the producers supplying specialty coffee beans are smallholder farmers from developing countries. Although their production techniques directly determine the physical characteristics of the beans, they have no power to intervene in the creation of the flavour wheel.

We might ask: why can some aromas enter the flavour wheel while others cannot? Why must we taste coffee according to the guidance of a flavour wheel rather than relying on our own intuition? If we truly believe that the production region has a decisive influence on coffee flavour, why has an industry association based in the West replaced local knowledge to dominate our appreciation of these flavours?

Similarly, in eras of food scarcity, refined carbohydrates like white rice and white flour, and the fats represented by meat and fish, were foods only the privileged classes could afford—they were symbols of status. But today, with the prevalence of fitness culture and nutrition science, these have become the root of all evil. Sweet potatoes and wild vegetables, once ‘poor man’s food’, have entered the mainstream as ‘whole grains’, ‘low GI’, and ‘natural’—now viewed as more ‘sophisticated’. In some dietary circles, wheat and flour-based products are even categorised as ‘toxic’, to say nothing of meat, eggs, and dairy, which are shunned by vegetarians.

● Steamed sweet potatoes with red and brown rice might have been poor man’s food decades ago, but today they are considered health food. Image source: Foodthink
Over the past two decades, there has been a general consensus within international academia that in agricultural markets, those who control the channels of market access hold more power in defining quality, and thus capture a greater share of the value distribution. The contest over differing perceptions of quality is, in essence, a struggle for market discourse power. This is a complex and protracted process—ranging from the establishment of production rules to the enforcement of market access standards and the oversight of market regulation—in which producers, sellers, public authorities, and consumers all participate, whether actively or passively.

II. Opaque Legislation and Regulatory Mechanisms

In conventional markets, consumers are often forced to passively accept pre-established quality standards. How these quality standards are transformed into laws and regulations, and how they are enforced, has always been a matter of public concern but one that remains difficult to influence, as both legislation and enforcement are opaque processes.

Regarding legislation on quality assessment: in Europe and the US, large food and agricultural corporations lobby politicians through trade associations to shape legislation that favours big business. Ordinary consumers and small-scale producers are marginalised in this process.

In China, this process is government-led. Although extensive industry research is conducted and experts are involved, the demands of consumers and small producers are rarely heard; instead, large enterprises have far greater opportunities to participate.

However, whether at home or abroad, even when consumers are organised enough to participate in legislation or industry norms, they cannot overcome the profound information asymmetry caused by excessively long production chains.

Overall, consumers still face a significant cognitive barrier when it comes to participating in the creation and supervision of quality standards. This is directly linked to the increasingly specialised division of labour, the lengthening of supply chains, and the growing complexity of regulatory systems.

Consumers are becoming increasingly distanced from the production process, while the knowledge required for each stage of production is becoming more specialised. A consumer would need to become an expert just to judge how various standards affect them. Even with expert knowledge, they would still have to determine whether the information disclosed by producers and market supervisors (usually public authorities) is truthful. To not only understand the production process but also to supervise the supervisors is, for an average consumer, an almost impossible task.

III. The Limitations of Certification Systems

To address the lack of transparency in the production chain, various institutional and technological innovations have emerged worldwide. Third-party certification systems were created specifically to tackle this opacity. Their solution is to record production information in a highly standardised and formalised manner, using these records as the basis for measuring production methods, which are then certified by a third party. For example, at Whole Foods Market in the US, one frequently sees not only organic certifications but also Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, and certifications for indigenous production.

Over the last twenty years, the certification market has flourished. For every consumer concern or requirement regarding quality—from dietary restrictions and food safety to environmental demands and animal welfare—a corresponding certification system has been developed. A recent advancement is the use of blockchain technology for certification, which records production information through layers of encryption, making it significantly harder to tamper with the data. Foodthink has previously published an article discussing and questioning this approach.

 

Whether it is certification or blockchain, the common thread is the use of a specific, supposedly objective method to measure the production process, under the assumption that supervision is ultimately realised through this concrete measurement. The logic is that if the measurement is rigorous, the result is correct. However, neither certification nor blockchain has answered the following questions.

From the consumer’s perspective, firstly, under certification systems, consumers often passively accept the definition of quality imposed by the system. Taking US organic certification as an example, the definition of “organic” is primarily shaped by different producer groups (small and medium-sized farmers are also marginalised here). Consumers can only choose from within the rules already established.

Secondly, with third-party certification, consumers do not actually know how the certification is implemented. They remain distant from the collection of information during production and cannot understand what information is being gathered or how. When the act of certification itself becomes an industry chain, it immediately reproduces the same opacity, concentrating the power to define value in the hands of those who design the certification systems and execute the schemes.

From the producer’s perspective, because third-party certification is fundamentally a commodity traded in the market, certifiers have an inherent need to make their standards widely applicable and replicable to increase their market share. For a standard to be used on a large scale, it must be standardised, which means it cannot accommodate diverse production systems. Consequently, the food value represented by a certification may be disconnected from the knowledge, skills, and environment of the frontline producers—the food is filtered, processed, and packaged through numerous layers from field to table. In this process, the distribution and marketing stages exert far more control over the shaping of food value than most small producers do. Meanwhile, consumers often have no way of knowing what has happened during this process and are left to let marketing information dominate their purchasing decisions.

So, are consumers merely powerless? Tomorrow is March 15th, Consumer Rights Day, and I will continue this discussion by introducing a case I have been following. In this case, consumers are able to participate in quality assessment, though they face many challenges.

Foodthink Author

Li Shumeng

PhD in Sociology from Cornell University, USA; Post-doctoral Fellow at the Asian Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research focuses primarily on value distribution and consumption ethics in food production.

 

 

Editor: Tianle

Published by Foodthink