Small is beautiful: firm size, prevention and food safety

- Analyse the link between food operators' size and food safety efforts.
- Provide a technical relationship between food firms size and prevention effort.
- Discuss differences between food safety laws in Europe and the US.
- Argue that small food firms' exemptions in the US should be based on risk analysis.

Food safety crises have led governments to increase food firms' responsibility by asking them to voluntarily implement prevention efforts. In this article, we explore the relationship between food firms' size and their level of prevention efforts. We show that when cross-contamination between units is unlikely, small firms undertake greater prevention efforts than large firms. But when cross-contamination between units is possible, the effort-size curve is an inverted U-shape. Using these results, we discuss food safety laws in Europe and in the US, which differ in how they deal with the size of food firms' operations.