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This paper assesses the responses made by food companies to changes in food safety legislation. Such responses are assessed in three ways. Firstly, an assessment is made as to why strategic responses to such legislation might be different to general strategic behaviour. Secondly a conceptual framework is presented and an examination of supply chain organisational response is made. Finally, the paper addresses the question of external marketing responses to food safety legislation. The paper concludes that food safety legislation is different, and often requires very swift strategic actions to be effective. Like other forms of legislation, however, food safety issues can also provide incentives and opportunities to well-managed and market-orientated firms.

The traditional approach to the analysis of food policy treats government as an impartial 'clearing house,' balancing the needs of different groups and correcting for market failures. Recent writings on political economy, particularly relating to agriculture, argue that policy making should be treated as an endogenous component of the food system which depends on the nature of the political institutions and the policy-making process and on interest groups and their relative strengths. In this paper these ideas are discussed in relation to food policy generally and, in particular, to three specific examples: food safety; food research and development (RD and food labeling. The preliminary analysis presented in this paper supports the view that this is a fruitful area for further investigation. Copyright 1995 by Oxford University Press.