Frontpage  About  admin@impgroup.org
Paper info: Evidence for Markets, Markets for Evidence: Extending Evidence-Based Medicine to the Food Sector

Title


Evidence for Markets, Markets for Evidence: Extending Evidence-Based Medicine to the Food Sector

Authors


Frank Azimont and
Luis Araujo
University of Manchester
United Kingdom
Luis Araujo

Place of Publication


The paper was published at the 28th IMP-conference in Rome, Italy in 2012.

Download


Download paper
(159.1 kb)

Abstract


This paper addresses the topic of standards and orders of worth and how they affect the relation between markets and firms. Our empirical setting is the emerging field of functional foods or foods which claim to have a health benefit. We follow how this market was formed and the critical role of standards in defining the product category and qualifying the evidence that could be used in claims about health benefits. These standards were largely based on those in use in the pharmaceutical industry which takes randomised clinical trials as the gold standard of evidence that has to be met before manufacturers are allowed to market their products.In a second half of the paper, we shift our focus to how one large food multinational attempted to develop a market for functional foods, in parallel with more conventional foods and cognate areas such as medical nutrition. We show how this manufacturer addressed the development and marketing of functional foods and how it how it invested in creating an infrastructure to produce and use scientific evidence in its efforts to position itself in this market. We argue that these efforts produced a clash of different orders of worth within our focal company which eventually led to a significant decrease of its commitment to the functional foods market.