Challenges in marketing quality food products

This special double issue of the Journal of International Food & Agribusiness Marketing is based on a selection of papers that were originally presented during the 105th seminar of the European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE) on "International Marketing and International Trade of Quality Food Products". This seminar was held at the Faculty of Agriculture in Bologna on March 8-10, 2007. The 105th EAAE Seminar was organized by the Department of Agricultural Economics and Engineering in concurrence with the third meeting of the BEAN-QUORUM project (Building a Euro-Asian Network for Quality, Organic, and Unique food Marketing - TH/Asia-Link/006) funded by the European Union's Asia-Link Programme. The Asia-Link Programme is dedicated to the promotion of regional and multilateral networking between higher education institutions in European Union Member States and South Asia, South-East Asia and China. The BEAN-QUORUM consortium is composed of five Asian and European Universities, aiming at setting up long-term relationships and enlarging the initial network to other Higher Education Institutions, companies, governmental bodies, or any other subjects in the food industry who are interested in the topic of marketing for quality food. The EAAE seminar raised a good deal of interest. Approximately one hundred scholars from twenty-five Countries attended the many plenary and concurrent sessions where sixty contributed papers and posters were presented. The main motivation for this initiative was the increasing relevance for agricultural and food products of the keywords "Marketing," "International Trade" and "Quality" in the scientific debate among agricultural economists. These three keywords raise many controversial issues. The word "Marketing" may be interpreted in many ways, by which the specific topic of the agricultural and food marketing may be considered. "Quality" is a controversial word too. It is apparent that an overall improvement of the quality of agri-food products is a strategic task for agriculture and rural economic development and has become a policy priority. Finally, “International Trade,” the related actions for its development and regulation, and the magnitude of the traded volumes of commodities within and between the main trade blocks are undoubtedly hot issues. In this context, however, we focus our attention on trade of food products as differentiated goods, rather than as commodities. Rather than gathering the issues linked by these three keywords, the aim of the EAAE seminar was to link them together and consider connections, overlaps, contradictions and complementarities. The intimate link between marketing and quality is a matter of fact, and the specificity of the food industry has highlighted the need to develop a conceptual approach that could be more consistent with the peculiarities of both the organization of the food sector and the behavior of food product consumers. The publication of numerous studies on consumer preferences and behavior considering quality and value-adding attributes of food is a demonstration that this link is already a cornerstone of recent research in agricultural and food economics. The analysis of trade still mainly focuses on commodities in the economic literature, but the issue of quality and the related marketing problems are also gaining ground. The present special issue contains articles that cover several aspects of food quality in an international context and the related marketing issues. This special issue opens with the article "Food quality and product export performance – an empirical investigation of the EU situation", authored by Christian Fischer, which provides a general framework for the context outlined above. This article investigates the relationship between product quality (as indicated by unit value) and export performance, measured in both absolute (per capita) and relative terms, in five EU countries. Fischer find...