The impact of food safety status on voluntary food safety information disclosure: evidence from Chinese listed agricultural product processing enterprises

Ensuring food safety is paramount to global public welfare, yet information asymmetry poses a fundamental challenge. Existing studies largely explain disclosure from external and internal governance perspectives, but rarely focus on firms’ own food safety status. Signalling theory and legitimacy theory predict opposite disclosure motivations, making it difficult to explain why voluntary disclosure differs across varying food safety conditions. In contexts of constrained regulatory resources and potential strategic information manipulation, elucidating how food safety status influences voluntary disclosure is crucial for effective regulation and corporate sustainability. The empirical results show that there exists a significant U-shaped relationship between food safety status and voluntary food safety information disclosure. Performance pressure significantly moderates the U-shaped relationship, flattening the curve and narrowing the disclosure gap between firms with different safety performance. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the influence of food safety status on voluntary food safety information disclosure exhibits heterogeneous effects across behaviour and strategy, industry attributes, social attention, and belonging region. Regulating voluntary disclosure can enhance transparency and market legitimacy. This study provides an operational paradigm for China and offers lessons for other developing countries.