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This study develops and tests a novel product quality framework for food supply chains (FSCs) that addresses sustainability. Issues including climate change, population growth, and the resources required by industrialized agriculture, as well as changing consumer preferences contribute to concerns about the social, ecological, and economic sustainability of FSCs. FSCs, therefore, need to be adapted to address changing supply and demand characteristics. We integrate the natural resource-based view (NRBV) with convention theory (CT) to develop a new set of quality dimensions. Placing social and ecological considerations within the domain of quality management advances theory in two ways. First, while social and ecological considerations are typically peripheral to business models, this framework allows social responsibility and the natural environment to occupy a central place within FSC operations. Second, the framework reflects the fundamentally socially embedded nature of FSCs, including the geographic, historical, and cultural associations of food quality. We then construct a typology of quality conventions and FSCs. We empirically test the typology using a case study methodology with cases from the United States of America (USA). The analysis explores how firms bundle quality conventions across FSCs for competitive advantage. We also find a set of paths through which FSCs transition via exploitation, exploration and organizational ambidexterity to generate competitive advantage, highlighting tradeoffs that may arise as FSCs evolve. These tradeoffs, which relate to maintaining or adapting quality conventions, are practically important because, if not managed appropriately, may result in lower performance and less sustainable FSCs.

A product recall is an observable external quality failure and a source of significant potential loss to firms as well as a threat to public safety. While such failures can be a motivation for organizational learning, little is known about the extent to which recalls can be a source of learning experience. Using econometric modeling, we investigate to what extent firms learn from conformance quality failures using a panel sample of U.S. food product recalls conducted by 125 publically traded firms between 2004 and 2013. We differentiate between direct (i.e., internal locus of failure) and indirect (i.e., supplier locus of failure and industry recalls) sources of experience and examine the main and interaction effects on the likelihood of future recalls. The results indicate that experience derived from internal and supplier failures reduces the potential for future recalls, while industry recalls have no significant main effect. We also find evidence of substitution effects between internal and supplier failures, suggesting that there are diminishing learning effects at higher levels of both of these types of failures. This finding suggests that the variety and volume of information as well as uncertainty regarding outcomes can overwhelm firm information processing capabilities at higher levels of these failure types and that additional resources should be allocated to encourage adequate learning. Finally, internal failures and industry recalls act as learning complements, which may indicate that internal quality failures become more relevant when industry peers also experience quality failures.

An increasing emphasis on social responsibility from consumers, media, and government agencies has expanded the discourse around product recalls from what can be done to prevent a product recall to also include what can be done to make a product recall more effective to reduce harm to consumers. Surprisingly, little research has addressed the latter, leaving a gap in our understanding, while a substantive body of research has investigated the former. As a result of this gap, managers face a dilemma regarding what recall strategy to adopt in order to conduct an effective recall and reduce harm to consumers. To address this dilemma, we empirically examine how recall strategy affects two measures of recall effectiveness, recall completion time and recalled product recovered, using secondary data from recalls regulated by the United States Department of Agriculture from 2005 to 2015. We further investigate how the difficulty or complexity associated with the recall task may moderate the relationship between recall strategies and recall effectiveness. Our results provide managers with actionable guidance regarding the influence of different recall strategies, and indicate that the effect of recall strategy on performance may depend on the complexity of the recall recovery task.