Transparency & health : from must-know to nice-to-know? : the relevance of variability for consumer dialogues on food and health

Within the field of Chain and Network Sciences, much research is currently devoted to the theme of transparency. Typically, food safety is often the product quality attribute that triggers the necessary documentation of practices in the food production chain (e.g. usage of ingredients and processes), in order for its actors to be able to provide guarantees and answer questions in time of disruptive events. At the same time, the collected information is also found highly useful to optimize operations in order to minimize product loss, while maintaining product freshness and attractiveness to the retailer¿s customers. In contrast, how transparency is achieved on information on health benefits of food is much less described. Likewise, while the various forms how the institutional actors of a netchain exchange information with one another has been extensively described, much less thought has been cast into hypotheses on how institutional actors can effectively communicate with the lay public on ¿food & health¿. This paper describes how transparency could be defined when applying it to attributes of food related to health benefits. In particular, the way various types of variability, heterogeneity and uncertainty would be addressed has implications for the format and content of the dialogues that could take place between the institutional food supply actors and the public. The main conclusions are: Transparency is as much determined by the extent to which dialogues between stakeholders are started than by the extent to which a shared understanding of certain information is established Effective dialogues on food & health adopt different formats and revolve around different themes than those on food safety. This is mainly due to the different perceived responsibility structure. Finally, several hypotheses are formulated, and some element of a future research agenda are given