| The premise of this paper is investigation into retailer-driven agri-food supply channels. Food sector dominant UK multiple retailers have in recent years invested in close Category Management (CM) based supply channel relationships with key/ preferred suppliers (Hingley, 2004; Hingley, Lindgreen and Casswell, 2006; Sodano and Hingley, 2007). Category Management allows a nominated supplier to take greater responsibility for the entire supply chain of a given product category and aims to maximise sales and profitability through an end consumer orientation (Jarvis and Woolven, 1999) and this became universally employed by retailers in recent years (Hingley, 2005a). However, critics such as Dapiran and Hogarth-Scott (2003) contend that the development of CM... |
