315: Who Really Gets the Final Say on Quality?

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Foodthink Says

“315” is short for Consumer Rights Day. Every year on this date, people habitually turn their gaze to seeing which counterfeit products CCTV has busted. But in everyday life, products have more than just two dimensions of real and fake; consumers also care about the quality of what they buy and whether money has been spent where it really counts. In the view of Dr Li Shumeng, who researches economic sociology, quality is not a naturally existing concept but is shaped by different social groups and forces. Understanding the quality of a product means grappling with who holds greater power to define it and how that power was established. So how can consumers truly claim this power? What forces undermine or even strip it away? In this article, Shumeng uses food as a lens to trace the contest over the power to define quality in food consumption.

For more on consumer rights, click here: 315: Beyond Waiting for Fakes to Be Busted, How Can Consumers Tell What’s “Genuine”?

I. Formation of the Value Chain

How do consumers understand the quality of a particular product or service? My interest in this question grows out of a theme I have long explored in my research—how do we define the value of a given kind of labour or skill? As consumers, we all want to feel that what we pay is worth it. So understanding what constitutes good quality, what is worth paying for, shapes every purchasing decision we make. When it comes to food, most consumers want it to be safe first and tasty second. But where do our notions of “safe” and “tasty” come from, and what forces shape them?

●At Shunde’s markets, vegetables carry no information about quality beyond their price, nor is there any premium to speak of. Photo: Foodthink

From a technical standpoint, place of origin and method of production have the most direct impact on safety and flavour. Yet most consumers have little in-depth knowledge of these matters. It is, rather, the various marketing narratives that most directly shape consumers’ ideas of quality. Take, for instance, the same fruit from the same batch, sourced from the Xinfadi Wholesale Market: once it enters different retail channels, a premium supermarket can command a higher price than a community greengrocer, simply because the consumption environment the supermarket cultivates conveys and reinforces the message that “more expensive, more refined equals better quality”—and consumers, by default, accept that the fruit there may cost more than at a wet market.

This is the inevitable outcome of the prevailing market structure—under a high degree of division of labour, countless intermediaries separate food producers from consumers, making it difficult for consumers to understand what happens at the production end. This information asymmetry also gives those intermediary stages greater power to influence how consumers perceive a product. The result is a long value chain—the basic form of the food remains unchanged, yet each intermediary stage adds value through extra packaging and marketing. Strip away the necessary costs of transport, storage and sales, and part of what consumers pay for is, in effect, a bill for marketing narratives.

●Hong Kong’s Yau Ma Tei Fruit Market is a renowned hub for imported fruit, where produce from all over the world can command high prices as a matter of course—even Japanese strawberries are subject to a snobbish ranking by origin and variety. Photo: Foodthink

Such a power structure is hardly fair to consumers or to smallholder farmers. Consumers are more likely to be led by the nose by marketing rhetoric, finding it harder to form their own experience-based judgements and lacking the confidence to challenge what they are told. Small producers, meanwhile, have neither the funds nor the energy to market their products, let alone showcase the knowledge and skills gained at the coalface of production.

Take the coffee flavour wheel that Foodthink has discussed before. Under the industry standards set by the Specialty Coffee Association, coffee beans are categorised and graded by aroma, and certain growing regions are revered for producing beans with particular aromatic profiles. Yet the definitions behind these aromas are rooted in the olfactory vocabulary of America’s industrialised food system. Who would imagine that the “peach” note on the coffee flavour wheel refers not to a fresh peach but to peach-flavoured jelly?! (A Lingnan author studying gastronomy in Italy discovered for Foodthink that the “lychee” flavour on the coffee flavour wheel more closely resembles canned lychee than any fresh lychee variety she knows.)

●The image of the authoritative coffee flavour wheel is familiar to many, but how many realise that its benchmark flavours are mostly processed foods familiar to Americans—jams, juices and the like—rather than fresh produce. Image: World Coffee Research

Meanwhile, the vast majority of producers supplying specialty coffee beans are smallholder farmers in developing countries. Though their production techniques directly determine the physical characteristics of the beans, they have no say in setting the flavour wheel’s standards.

We might also ask: why are certain aromas admitted to the flavour wheel while others are not? Why should we taste coffee guided by the flavour wheel rather than trusting our own instincts? If we genuinely believe that place of origin decisively shapes coffee’s flavour, why is it industry associations based in Europe and North America—rather than the local knowledge of growing regions—that dictate how we appreciate the flavour of coffee?

Consider, too, that in eras of scarcity, refined carbohydrates such as white rice and white flour, along with the fat represented by lavish plates of meat and fish, were foods reserved for the privileged and served as markers of status. Yet in today’s age of fitness culture and mainstream nutrition science, these same foods have become the root of all evil. Sweet potato, wild vegetables and other foods once dismissed as “poor man’s fare” have now entered respectable households under the more “upscale” guises of coarse grains, low-GI and natural foods. In certain dietary movements, wheat and flour products are even branded as “toxic”—to say nothing of the meat, eggs and dairy that vegetarians shun.

●Steamed sweet potato with red rice and brown rice was once a poor man’s meal decades ago, yet today it is hailed as a health food. Photo: Foodthink
Over the past two decades, it has been widely recognised in international academia that in agricultural product markets, whoever controls the channels of market access wields greater power to define quality, and thus gains the upper hand in value distribution. The contest over differing perceptions of quality is, in essence, a struggle over the power to define what the market means, and the processes involved are complex and protracted—from the formulation of production rules, to the enforcement of market access standards, to the oversight of market regulation itself. Producers, retailers, public authorities and consumers all participate, whether willingly or not.

II. Opaque Legislative and Regulatory Mechanisms

In conventional markets, consumers are frequently left to passively accept quality standards that have already been set. How quality standards become law, and how that law is enforced, has long been a matter of public concern yet difficult for ordinary people to engage with, because both legislative and enforcement processes lack transparency.

Take the legislation governing quality assessment. In Europe and North America, major food and agricultural corporations lobby politicians through industry associations and similar bodies to draft legislation that favours large enterprises. Ordinary consumers and small producers are marginalised in this process.

Domestically, this process is government-led. Although extensive industry research is conducted in the preliminary stages with expert participation, the concerns of consumers and small producers are rarely heard—large enterprises, by contrast, have far greater opportunity to take part.

Yet whether at home or abroad, even if consumers can be organised to participate in legislation or industry norms, they cannot alter the profound information asymmetry created by the extraordinarily long production chain.

In short, consumers still face a steep cognitive barrier when it comes to participating in the formulation and oversight of quality standards. This is directly linked to the ever more granular division of labour, the ever-lengthening industry chains, and the increasingly complex regulatory systems of our time.

Consumers are ever further removed from the production process, and the knowledge required at each stage grows ever more specialised. To gauge how various standards affect them, consumers would need to become experts. Even armed with an expert’s knowledge, a consumer would still have to judge whether the information disclosed by producers and market oversight bodies (typically public authorities) is truthful. Not only must one understand the production process, but one must also hold the overseers to account—for an ordinary consumer, this is close to an impossible task.

III. The Limitations of Certification Systems

To address the problem of information opacity within the production chain, a variety of institutional and technological innovations have emerged around the world. Third-party certification was developed precisely in response to this opacity. Its proposed solution is to record production information in a highly standardised and systematic manner, using those records as the basis for evaluating production practices, with certification carried out by an independent third party. For example, in Whole Foods Market in the United States, what one frequently encounters includes not only organic certification but also Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, and indigenous production certifications, among others.

Over the past two decades, the certification market has flourished, with a system developed to address every conceivable consumer concern or requirement regarding quality—from dietary restrictions and food safety to environmental demands and animal welfare. A more recent development is certification via blockchain technology, which records production information through layers of encryption, making it vastly more difficult to tamper with. Foodthink has previously published an article discussing this issue and raising questions about it.

 

Yet whether certification or blockchain, what they share in common is the use of a specific—and assumed objective—method to measure the production process, premised on the idea that oversight ultimately rests on this particular form of measurement. If the measurement method is rigorous, the result is taken to be correct. But neither certification nor blockchain can answer the following questions.

From the consumer’s perspective, first, under a certification system, consumers are often passively accepting the system’s definition of quality. Take organic certification in the United States: the definition of “organic” is shaped primarily by various producer groups (small and medium-scale farmers being marginalised in this process too). Consumers can only make choices within rules that have already been established.

Furthermore, in third-party certification, consumers have little real knowledge of how certification is carried out. They remain removed from the gathering of information during production, unable to know what information is collected or how it is collected. Once certification itself becomes a value chain, it immediately reproduces information asymmetry and concentrates the power to define value in the hands of those who design certification schemes and carry them out.

From the producer’s perspective, since third-party certification is fundamentally a commodity circulating in the market, certifying bodies naturally have an incentive to ensure their standards are widely adopted and replicated in order to expand their market share. Widespread adoption necessitates standardisation, which in turn means that the diversity of production systems cannot be fully accommodated. This means that the value of food represented by certification may be disconnected from the knowledge, skills, and environments of producers at the source—food passes through layer upon layer of sorting, processing and packaging on its journey from field to table. Within this chain, the distribution and marketing stages shape and control the value of food far beyond the reach of most smallholder farmers. At the same time, consumers often have no way of knowing what transpires in this process and can only allow marketing messages to steer their purchasing decisions.

So are consumers simply resigned to sitting and doing nothing? Tomorrow is 315 Consumer Rights Day. I will continue this thread and introduce a case I have been following, in which consumers are able to participate in defining quality—yet face many challenges.

Foodthink Author

Li Shumeng

PhD in Sociology, Cornell University, United States; Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research focuses primarily on value distribution in food production and consumption ethics.

 

 

Editor: Tianle

Published by Foodthink