Rebuilding Trust in Food Safety through Tiered Supplier Management: A Two-Dimensional Risk-Based Framework

Food-safety incidents—from allergen mislabeling and pathogen contamination to raw-material adulteration—can rapidly destroy consumer trust, yet many food enterprises still rely on static, one-size-fits-all supplier audits. This paper develops a two-dimensional, risk-based framework for rebuilding food-safety trust through tiered supplier management. Two composite dimensions are constructed: Risk Exposure (ER), which captures the inherent risk of a supplier or product from raw-material sensitivity, supply-chain complexity, historical risk data, and substitution difficulty; and Management Capability (MC), which measures the effectiveness of a supplier's quality systems, traceability technology, testing capacity, and crisis response. A 3×3 risk-positioning matrix maps the two dimensions into four color-coded risk tiers (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green), each linked to a differentiated audit package, and a dynamic reassessment mechanism with quantitative trigger thresholds and a cost-minimization model is designed to keep audits aligned with changing risk. A case study of LRQA's engagement with a multinational food group covering 300 suppliers shows that the approach reduced the raw-material sampling failure rate from 5.2% to 1.8%, lowered annual audit costs from RMB 3.86 million to 2.17 million, and cut quarterly customer complaints from 47 to 9. The framework offers a practical, data-driven path from compliance-driven inspection to intelligence-led supplier assurance.