Food culture distance and firm internationalization decisions

This projects studies the impact of managers’ perception of dissimilarity in food culture between markets—“food culture distance”—on food companies’ internationalization decisions.

This project is part of Goudarz Azar’s doctoral project which is supervised by Bo Öhlmer, Helena Hansson and Karin Hakelius.

Food exporters, by the nature of their products, will have uniquely cultural distances to contend with when expanding into international markets, i.e., food culture distance. In this project, the impact of managers’ perception of food culture distance on two fundamental internationalization decisions—adaptation strategy and foreign market selection—is examined.

Data were gathered via a mail survey of Swedish and Finnish food exporters. The results indicate a significant correlation between food culture distance and the extent of product adaptation. In other words, when a food exporter recognizes that it is exporting to a foreign market that differs substantially in food culture from its home market, it adapts its products to that specific market. Moreover, food culture distance does positively impact the attractiveness of a foreign market for food exporters, implying that the greater the perceived distance in terms of food culture, the more attractive is the market for food exporters to enter.