*4.3. Cases Competing Based on Multiple Quadrants*

Thirteen cases occupy two quadrants and a single case occupies three quadrants of the typology. Our analysis indicates that there are several motivations for competing in this manner. First, with respect to demand characteristics, consumer preferences are changing. Increasingly, US consumers express interest in food safety, nutrition, as well as social and environmental issues around how food is produced [64]. Recent surveys of US consumers suggest that food purchase decisions have shifted from traditional drivers of price, convenience, and taste towards evolving drivers such as health and wellness, safety, social impact, personal engagement, and transparency [27]. However, at the same time a majority of global consumers express doubts about the validity of food label claims [64] and for several decades, US consumers have expressed distrust in the food industry, and more specifically, large food corporations [65].

Our analysis finds that the majority of firms occupying multiple quadrants appear to do so in order to address consumer preferences and to ensure long-term firm survival. Cases A, B, C, M, and O each compete within the Mainstream quadrant as well as Growth. This combination reflects what appears to be a nearly complete intertwining of Mainstream and Growth FSCs via exploitation of industrial conventions. While this offers potential competitive advantage for firms and choice for consumers, it also presents challenges for managers attempting to manage FSCs with different sets of quality conventions. Furthermore, the pressure to achieve efficiency and scale could strain the ability of Growth FSCs, operating in combination with Mainstream FSCs, to maintain differentiating characteristics. One example of these challenges has arisen in the dairy industry, where a series of allegations have been made that large organic milk producers do not fulfill the pasturing requirements of certified organic dairy production [66]. Even if such allegations remain unsubstantiated, such issues could erode consumer trust and compromise the ability of Growth dairy to earn a premium. Organic certification currently relies on achieving and maintaining standards of practice with up-front certification and infrequent auditing rather than testing, however, evolution of testing capabilities may eventually enable routine discrimination between compliant and non-compliant organic dairy [67].

Changing supply characteristics provide a second driver for competing in multiple quadrants. Mainstream producers may be interested in hedging against future supply uncertainty for a variety of reasons. Natural resource depletion associated with Mainstream agriculture, as well as climate change may render inputs to existing processes more costly and outputs less productive [68]. In the long term, current global production capacity is insufficient to support projected population growth [6].

If successful, Future Emergent technologies have the potential to minimize resources required to satisfy future demand, as well as to reduce risk associated with contamination [69]. Despite advances in production, monitoring, and testing methods, food safety continues to be a problem, even in developed economies with mature regulatory systems such as the US [70]. The interconnectedness, global reach, as well as a relative lack of transparency and traceability in FSCs contribute to food safety risk [22,71]; in addition, aspects of industrialized agriculture may contribute to the incidence of such failures [72,73].

Finally, firms may expand to multiple quadrants in order to explore and exploit simultaneously, implementing a strategy of operational ambidexterity [56,74,75]. Food industry firms face both high levels of competition as well as high levels of dynamism [74]; as a result, a combination of exploration and exploitation may be advantageous if the firm can balance both activities [69,75,76].
