Breaking food safety and quality standards in the EU: Financial aspects within poultry products manufacturers in Visegrad 4 countries.

Under changing consumer preferences towards the need to increase qualitative side of food consumption, the level of meeting EU food safety and quality standards can be discussed as a specific factor of competitiveness for food manufacturers. The EU member countries use an information exchange instrument named Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASSF) for sharing information with both public authorities and consumers. An increasing number of food safety and quality problems was observed in the year 2019 regarding the industry branch EU NACE 1012 - poultry meat and poultry meat products in CEEC countries. This paper aims at the identification of common factors in the financial performance of businesses active in the industry mentioned above within Visegrad 4 member countries focusing on a specific distinctive period between 2009 and 2017. The authors employ factorial analysis of variance approach together with a post hoc Scheffé test for revealing similarities/dissimilarities within the selected key financial performance indicators for the sample of poultry meat and poultry meat products manufacturers. Namely, factors to be researched are country of business entities' settlement, economic size and time proxy variable element of the observed years. The sample consists of different size categories of manufacturers, which were active in the Visegrad 4 countries during the period from 2009 to 2017, to cover both the period of economic downturn and the period of economic growth renewal. The source of harmonized secondary corporate financial data was the database ORBIS of Bureau Van Dijk. The presented results support the need for the existence of the EU food safety and quality policy on both consumers' side and the side of producers to create and sustain equal and fair competitive environment in this industry. The conducted empirical analysis on financial microbusiness data of poultry meat and poultry meat products manufacturers in V4 countries proved a prevailing cost efficiency and productivity focus before safety and quality of production (measured by the number of the reported incidents in EU RASFF). The authors claim that accessible microfinance data on food manufacturers and their respective branches could help enhance the processes of effects' identification for safety and quality food governance, not only at the EU level but also at the level of respective EU member countries' authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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