Abstract

As consumers become increasingly concerned with the treatment of animals involved in food production, animal welfare charities find their efforts becoming more relevant to stakeholders across the food industry. However, little is known about how exactly animal welfare charities impact food supply chains. This gap is especially important to fill given that exemplar charities, of which there are few, are remarkably more successful at improving animal welfare in comparison to the numerous average charities impacting the industry. I therefore performed an exploratory study to investigate how exemplar animal charities impact the level of responsibility in food supply chains. Using reputational sampling, I selected three top-performing charities for an embedded case study. Based on a systematic literature review and secondary qualitative data, including the charities’ performance evaluations and published reports, I conducted within-case and cross-case analyses which highlighted the primary practices and stakeholders being targeted by the charities’ interventions. The results showed that these interventions targeted five main categories of food supply chain practices: operations, measurement, supplier continuity, learning, and external stakeholder practices. I also found that exemplar charities (a) target multiple food supply chain stakeholders and practices simultaneously, (b) consistently collaborate with other NGOs, (c) use a mix of confrontational and supportive approaches to target stakeholders, and (d) tend to focus heavily on practices associated with establishing measurement across the chain and reforming operations.