COST-BENEFIT ASSESSMENT OF HACCP IMPLEMENTATION IN COMMERCIAL RETAIL FOODSERVICE OPERATIONS

Commercial retail foodservice organizations such as restaurants, grocery stores, and gas stations typically do not account for food safety costs and benefits. Lack of this information could prevent owners and managers of these foodservice organizations from making informed decisions about implementing HACCP-based food safety processes. The goal of this project is to address this critical gap in management decision-making for justifying food safety expenditures. An assessment framework based on essential financial management principles for food safety expenditures will be developed and implemented. Specific objectives in the project include: 1. develop an activity based costing (ABC) system to assess current and future costs of food safety processes; 2. Implement the ABC system to assess incremental costs of implementing food safety processes and compare these costs to improved health inspection scores; 3. Develop a net present value (NPV) framework based on the ABC system and consumers perceived benefits of safe foods. 4. Train commercial foodservice corporate and unit level managers to implement the NPV based decision making framework; 5. Develop and implement controlled real-time choice experiments to assess consumers willingness-to-pay price premium for safe food attributes and changes in purchase frequencies; and 6. Provide food safety information to consumers to help them assess quality of food safety processes based on key attributes of safe foods. With half of all meals eaten away from home, it is important to agriculture to ensure the safe handling of food to prevent food borne illnesses and associated costs.