Food safety and innovation performance in Italian Agrifood sector - Abstract Conference Proceeding

Food safety climate (FSC) is commonly defined in terms of shared perception of different variables (leadership, communication, resources and risk awareness) that only taken together produce the desired outcomes (a climate of food safety). To fill in the lack of empirical research on the role played by each food safety climate’s component, the aim of the paper is to investigate if and how leadership impacts on internal communication, resources and risk awareness, and how these, in turn, impact on innovation performance in Italian agrifood companies. A sample of 4,614 Italian firms belonging to the sectors of agriculture, manufacturing, and fishing was extracted from the Atoka database. A questionnaire was administered by email investigating the firms’ characteristics, the dimensions of food safety climate, and innovation performance. A descriptive statistics analysis, and one-way ANOVA was run to test whether there were differences between FSC, and innovation performance depending on geographic localization. A structural model was created to test the hypotheses using PLS-SEM. Results confirm that leadership has a positive direct impact on each variable of food safety climate and enhances internal communication by promoting knowledge sharing among employees that stimulates innovation. Our work contributes to food safety literature by analysing the impact of each food safety climate components on innovation performance in the Italian agri-food sector and offer valuable insights that can help agri-food firms to understand food safety and its implications better. The main limitation of this paper is that data were collected from Italian firms and results cannot be generalized.