Supply chain security practices in the food industry : Do firms operating globally and domestically differ?

Purpose – This paper compares firms purchasing and/or selling food products internationally to those with domestic supply chains in order to determine if international firms: place greater managerial importance on security; and are more likely to engage supply chain partners in security‐related verification and information exchange. The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between security initiatives and firm performance in terms of security outcomes, product quality, and customer service. Design/methodology/approach – A series of one‐way ANOVA tests are used to assess the differences between firms with international and domestic supply chains. Additionally, cluster analysis is conducted to group firms based on their performance levels. Findings – Initial results indicate respondents with international supply chains perceive that their firms place more importance on security and are more likely to assess the security procedures of supply chain partners. Results further indicate that, in general, respondents in international firms perceive better security performance is achieved in terms of the ability to detect and recover from security incidents. Once firms are grouped by performance, respondents in the high‐performance cluster, represented predominantly by international firms, perceived significantly higher performance in the areas examined. Originality/value – This paper is the first to compare, the differences in security measures employed by firms maintaining internationally oriented as opposed to domestically oriented supply chains and also relates the implementation of supply chain security measures to security and firm performance.