This paper illustrates how supply chain (SC) analytics could provide strategic and operational insights to evaluate the risk-based allocation of regulatory resources in food SCs, for management of food safety and adulteration risks. This paper leverages data on 89,970 tests of aquatic products extracted from a self-constructed data set of 2.6 million food safety tests conducted by the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) organizations. The integrated and structured data set is used to conduct innovative analysis that identifies the sources of adulteration risks in China’s food SCs and contrasts them with the current test resource allocations of the CFDA. The analysis highlights multiple strategic insights. Particularly, it suggests potential gaps in the current CFDA testing allocation by SC location, which is heavily focused on retail and supermarkets. Instead, the analysis indicates that high-risk parts of the SC, such as wholesale and wet markets, are undersampled. Additionally, the paper highlights the impact that SC analytics could have on policy-level operational decision making to regulate food SCs and manage food safety. The hope is that the paper will stimulate the interest of academics with expertise in these areas to conduct more work in this important application domain. This paper was accepted by Charles Corbett, operations management.

This paper conducts an exploratory analysis on the role of social capital in influencing both economic and social performance of farmer cooperatives based on a sample of 156 farmers from 54 vegetable cooperatives in China’s Hebei and Zhejiang provinces. Social capital is distinguished into bonding and bridging dimensions, with the former referring to the internal aspect of social capital and the latter the external “Guanxi” (meaning relationship) possessed by core members. The statistical results display that specific dimensions of social capital may not deliver the benefits expected by cooperative practitioners and academics. Both positive and negative effects of social capital on performances of farmer cooperatives are observed. To be specific, bonding social capital is positively associated with common members’ economic benefits. Bridging social capital generates beneficial outcomes for the financial and social performances of cooperatives, while exhibiting negative influence on common members’ income increase because of member heterogeneity.