Case Studies on Carrefour's Quality Lines in China

by Dinghuan Hu and Xia Dandan, August , 2006

While the supermarket develops rapidly in China and along with China's entering into the WTO, China begun to open its retail market in an all-round way in 2004 and foreign markets entered into China's market one after another, thus aggravates the competitions among supermarkets and between supermarkets and traditional retail stores. Chinese consumers have the habit of purchasing raw and fresh agri-food every day, therefore, the raw and fresh agri-foods have become an important measurement of supermarkets' attractiveness to consumers. At present, owing to the imperfect agri-food circulation system and infrastructure, the cost of raw and fresh agri-foods sold in supermarket is generally higher than that of vendors on wet markets. Therefore, from the view of marketing strategies, many supermarkets position their sales of raw and fresh agri-food on the medium and high level market. Many supermarkets provide choices of organic and green agri-food in chain stores.

It is said that few agri-food suppliers purchased ordinary agri-food from the wholesale market and then marked with the symbols of organic or green foods and sold to supermarkets. In what way do organic and green agri-foods enter China's supermarkets? What methods have been used to produce organic and green agri-foods? What kinds of organizations and systems can guarantee that these agri-foods reach organic and green food standards? These problems are closely related with consumers' health and supermarkets' reputation, but nobody has studied them seriously in China up to now. Therefore, with these problems in mind, we have conducted case studies with the raw and fresh agri-food quality line of Carrefour supermarket as the object of our research.

Full case study paper attached.