Public Private Partnerships in food industries: A road to success?

•The article uses the concept of PPP to avoid to refer to the political cycle as others researches do.•The article uses the concept of PPP to deal with the collective dimension of public private arrangements to food safety.•We link the PPPs literature to uncertainties linked to agricultural products specificities.•We provide a framework that help us to identify general incentive mechanisms that participate in their resilience.•We confront this framework to two case studies: a traceability system in Canada and pesticide residues programmes in France.

Recent food safety crises have led to the development of new collaborations between public authorities and food operators in monitoring food safety. To date, most of the literature has analyzed these collaborations as linked to a regulatory process and as a mean to comply with regulatory standards. In this paper, we take another stand and consider them as specific embedded institutions (meso-institutions) analysing them as Public Private Partnership specific to food safety provision. This new perspective allows us to take into account both information asymmetries and the industry-wide dimension of such programmes. Our overall intention is to provide a general enriched theoretical framework to highlight aligned incentive mechanisms in such partnerships. We then apply our framework to two case studies in order to better understand the main mechanisms at work that could explain their specific functioning and resilience. The two case studies are the cattle traceability system in Quebec (Canada) and monitoring programmes for pesticide residues in the French imports industry of fresh produce.