La qualité différenciée de la viande bovine. La nécessaire stratégie d'innovation

Differentiation of beef meat by quality. The necessary strategy of innovation. The beef meat supply chain faces with a very delicate situation: on the long term, red meat consumption in the Western countries is declining to benefit of meats of monogastrics (poultry and pork). Moreover, since the middle of the 1990s in France, a major sanitary crisis, the bovine spongiform encephalopathy, leads many consumers to stop or reduce their consumption of beef. Vis-a-vis this situation, the stakeholders have to react strongly. The purpose of this contribution is to show how the innovation, in all its forms, constitutes one of the means to restore the lost confidence. First of all, the author specially focuses on the various possible strategies while insisting on the innovations about products (technical and marketing) and organisation. A historical analysis of the development of the bovine meat processing industry makes it possible to highlight its current forces and weaknesses. It leads to the acknowledgement of the recent development of pre-packaged units of sale made by the industry and of a larger range of processed products that allow communication on private marks. On the organisational level, these changes are accompanied by deep evolutions on the definition of the processes and by the emergence of standardisation (in order to ensure a complete traceability for example by tracing and tracking). In a second time, the author shows how the recent changes in the processing sector of the bovine meat lead to an acceleration of industrialisation: the implementation of standards, the diffusion of schedules coming from quality insurance systems (like guide of good practices for example) as well as the requirements of the purchasers of supermarkets strongly boost the rationalisation of the production