The Influence Of Food Corporate Social Responsibility On The Financial Performance

Food companies as a special production industry, its products directly related to people’s physical health and safety. But in recent years, China’s food safety situation can not be optimistic, the events about the safety of food happened frequently,the voice which require food companies to fulfill their social responsibility rising. In this emerging market conditions, how to make food corporate undertake social responsibility through a market mechanism and means has become the focus of our attention. As a for-profit social and economic organization, the economic stimulus from the market is undoubtedly the companies’ intrinsic motivation to undertake social responsibility. Based on this starting point, this article attempts to study the relationship between the food corporate social responsibility and financial performance, meanwhile bring consumers which are intermediary into the relationship, in order to improve the social responsibility of food corporate and understand the possibility of compensating the cost of food corporate social responsibility from market, and thus provide some reference for enterprises dealing with social responsibility and self-development and promote the government to establish incentives for corporate social responsibility.First, this paper reviews the domestic and international relevant literature, then based on the content definition of corporate social responsibility, corporate social responsibility and the consumer behavior and the relationship of corporate social responsibility and financial performance that summarized, we come up with that the consumers is the main driving force of improving the level of corporate social responsibility by the theoretical analysis, on this basis raise the perspective of this study.Secondly, Review the theoretical basis of corporate social responsibility, the proposed stakeholder theory and contract theory is the theoretical basis for the definition of corporate social responsibility level content, based on the reputation capital theory and signaling theory to explain the mechanism and the road map of how corporate social responsibility impact on the financial performance, combined with analysis of existing research results and corporate social responsibility theory,we proposed the assume of this article.Thirdly, investigate the consumer awareness and demand about the social responsibility of food companies. Through the theory of corporate social responsibility, stakeholder theory and the characteristics of the food companies, this paper explore the content of the food of corporate social responsibility, divide the food corporate social responsibility into different levels, and build the food corporate social responsibility scale. Make consumer’ awareness and requirements of corporate social responsibility through interviews with consumers clear, then work out a descriptive statistical analysis of the survey results.Fourthly, review the several ways of evaluation of the level of corporate social responsibility, this paper selects index method to study the situation of corporate social responsibility information disclosure in China’s food industry., then use consumer demand for social responsibility as an evaluation index, combined with the index method to build the evaluation model to measure the level of corporate social responsibility.Again, this paper assesses the situation of corporate social responsibility of listed companies in food industry from2009to2011, by using the index system proposed in the paper. The study found that the level of social responsibility of food companies has been improving, but the overall level is low.Then, this paper researches the relationship of corporate social responsibility and financial performance of the food listed companies, explores the relevance of social responsibility and corporate financial performance of sample enterprises which meet the consumer’s demand. The empirical results show that the better the point of corporate social responsibility,the better the corporate financial performance are.Finally, by exploring the possibility of the compensation of the cost of corporate social responsibility and build the social incentive system, with a view to provide a reference of improving the lever of corporate social responsibility in food industry.