Abstract
The Australian food sector has absorbed a decade of compounding shocks, from the 2022 eastern-seaboard floods to escalating biosecurity incursions and fragile freight corridors, yet the resilience capabilities of firms across the value chain remain unevenly understood. This dissertation examines how disruption exposure and resilience capabilities vary across the sector, and how firms reconcile the tension between redundancy and efficiency. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design combined a survey of 218 Australian food and agribusiness firms with 15 semi-structured interviews. Quantitative results showed that downstream firms, particularly retail and foodservice operators, reported the strongest resilience capabilities, while primary producers reported the highest exposure and the weakest redundancy. Qualitative findings identified redundancy as costly insurance, biosecurity as an escalating structural risk, and relational capital as a partial substitute for capital-intensive buffers. The study concludes that resilience in the Australian food sector is distributed unequally along the chain and is built as much through relationships as through inventory.
Introduction
The food supply chain is among the most economically and socially significant systems in Australia. The gross value of Australian agricultural production has exceeded $90 billion in recent years, and the sector underpins domestic food security as well as a substantial export trade (ABARES 2023). Yet the networks that move food from farm to plate are long, seasonal and perishable, and they traverse a continent in which growing regions, processing capacity and population centres are separated by thousands of kilometres. These structural features make the sector unusually exposed to disruption, and they place the management of supply chain resilience at the centre of both firm strategy and public policy.
The past decade has supplied repeated demonstrations of that exposure. In February and March 2022, floods across south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales inundated concentrated growing regions such as the Lockyer Valley and the Northern Rivers, closed sections of the Bruce and Pacific highways, and forced produce onto longer inland routes at considerable cost. Earlier the same year, floodwaters severed the Trans-Australian rail corridor west of Adelaide, interrupting the principal freight link to Western Australia for weeks. Climate projections indicate that heavy-rainfall events of this kind will intensify, so such disruptions are better treated as a recurring operating condition than as exceptional events (CSIRO & Bureau of Meteorology 2022). Biosecurity has added a second, structurally distinct threat, with incursions such as the varroa mite and the persistent risk of foot-and-mouth and lumpy skin disease prompting a national response (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry [DAFF] 2022). Freight fragility, in turn, has been recognised as a national concern in the National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy (Commonwealth of Australia 2019), while the Productivity Commission (2021) concluded that although most Australian supply chains are robust, a small set of critical dependencies warrants active management by firms.
Despite this policy attention, the resilience capabilities of Australian food-sector firms have rarely been measured across the value chain, and the persistent tension between building redundancy and preserving efficiency remains under-examined in the local setting. This dissertation addresses that gap through a mixed methods study of firms spanning primary production to retail. Three research questions guided the research:
- How does exposure to disruption differ across firm types in the Australian food sector?
- How do resilience capabilities vary across firm types, and how are they associated with recovery from disruption?
- How do firms reconcile the tension between redundancy and efficiency?
Literature Review
Conceptualising supply chain resilience
Supply chain resilience is commonly defined as the capacity of a network to prepare for, respond to and recover from disruption while restoring operations to a desired level of performance (Christopher & Peck 2004). It is a systemic property rather than the attribute of a single firm, though it is enacted through firm-level decisions about structure, inventory and relationships. Pettit, Croxton and Fiksel (2019) argue that resilience is best understood as a balance between vulnerability and capability: firms that accumulate capability beyond their exposure erode profitability, whereas those whose capability falls short of their exposure court failure. Resilience, on this view, is not to be maximised but matched to the disruption profile a firm actually faces.
Resilience capabilities
A substantial literature has sought to decompose resilience into discrete capabilities. Jüttner and Maklan (2011) identify flexibility, velocity, visibility and collaboration as the capabilities through which firms detect and absorb disruption, a taxonomy that has become influential in empirical work. Flexibility denotes the ability to reconfigure sourcing, production and distribution; visibility denotes timely knowledge of conditions across the network; and collaboration denotes the sharing of information and risk between trading partners. Wieland and Wallenburg (2013) demonstrate that such relational competencies contribute to resilience independently of physical buffers, suggesting that resilience can be built through coordination as well as capital. Ambulkar, Blackhurst and Grawe (2015) extend this argument by framing resilience as a dynamic capability, in which firms reconfigure resources in response to disruption and learn from each event, an adaptive process rather than a fixed stock of assets.
Redundancy, efficiency and the Australian context
The most persistent tension in the field lies between redundancy and efficiency. Redundancy, in the form of buffer stock, spare capacity and multiple sources, provides a direct hedge against disruption but carries an ongoing cost that lean, cost-competitive operations are reluctant to bear (Sheffi & Rice 2005). Christopher and Peck (2004) accordingly favour flexibility over redundancy where possible, on the grounds that flexible assets earn their keep in normal operations as well as in crises. In the Australian food sector this tension is sharpened by the structure of the market. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has documented the weak bargaining position of many primary producers relative to concentrated processors and retailers, a power asymmetry that compresses producer margins and limits their capacity to fund redundancy (ACCC 2020). Two literatures thus meet without being joined: capability frameworks specify what resilience requires, while the Australian evidence describes an operating environment in which the firms most exposed to disruption are often least able to afford the capital-intensive forms of resilience. This study addresses that gap by measuring capabilities across firm types and examining how firms with differing resources reconcile redundancy and efficiency.
Methodology
Research design
An explanatory sequential mixed methods design was adopted (Creswell & Plano Clark 2018). A quantitative survey first established how exposure and capabilities varied across firm types; a qualitative interview phase then explained those patterns from the perspective of managers. The two phases were integrated at the point of interpretation, through a joint consideration of statistical patterns and interview themes. The study was organised around the conceptual framework shown in Figure 1, in which disruption exposure activates a set of resilience capabilities that in turn shape resilience outcomes, with a feedback loop representing adaptation and learning across successive disruptions.
Participants and procedure
The survey was completed by 218 Australian food and agribusiness firms recruited through industry associations and a commercial business panel. Respondents were senior managers with supply chain responsibility. Firms were grouped by their principal position in the value chain into primary producers (n = 62), food processors and manufacturers (n = 58), wholesalers and distributors (n = 49), and retail and foodservice operators (n = 49). Firms ranged from small enterprises to large nationals, and all mainland states and territories were represented. The interview subsample comprised 15 managers selected for maximum variation across firm type, size and jurisdiction.
Measures and analysis
Disruption exposure was measured with a multi-item index capturing the frequency and severity of climate, biosecurity and freight disruptions over the preceding three years, scored from 1 to 7. Resilience capabilities were measured across four sub-scales, flexibility, redundancy, visibility and collaboration, each scored from 1 to 7, with a composite resilience index formed as their mean. Respondents also rated their recovery speed following the most recent significant disruption and their overall cost efficiency. Quantitative analysis comprised descriptive statistics, one-way analysis of variance across firm types, Pearson correlations and the calculation of standardised effect sizes. The 15 interviews, each lasting 45 to 60 minutes, were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke 2021). The study received approval from the administering university’s human research ethics committee, and participation was voluntary, informed and de-identified.
Findings
Survey results
Table 1 reports exposure, the four capability sub-scales and the composite resilience index by firm type. A clear downstream gradient is evident. Primary producers reported the highest disruption exposure (M = 5.4) yet the lowest composite resilience (M = 3.7), driven in particular by weak redundancy (M = 3.6) and visibility (M = 3.2). Retail and foodservice operators reported the strongest composite resilience (M = 5.0), supported by high visibility (M = 5.3) and collaboration (M = 5.0), while wholesalers and distributors were close behind, their logistics orientation reflected in strong flexibility and visibility.
Table 1: Disruption exposure and resilience-capability scores by firm type (N = 218)
| Firm type | n | Exposure M (SD) | Flexibility M (SD) | Redundancy M (SD) | Visibility M (SD) | Collaboration M (SD) | Composite index M (SD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary producers | 62 | 5.4 (1.1) | 4.1 (1.2) | 3.6 (1.3) | 3.2 (1.2) | 4.0 (1.1) | 3.7 (1.0) |
| Food processors and manufacturers | 58 | 4.8 (1.2) | 4.6 (1.0) | 4.9 (1.1) | 4.4 (1.0) | 4.5 (1.0) | 4.6 (0.9) |
| Wholesalers and distributors | 49 | 5.0 (1.0) | 4.9 (0.9) | 4.2 (1.1) | 5.1 (0.9) | 4.7 (1.0) | 4.7 (0.9) |
| Retail and foodservice | 49 | 4.5 (1.1) | 5.0 (0.9) | 4.8 (1.0) | 5.3 (0.8) | 5.0 (0.9) | 5.0 (0.8) |
| Total sample | 218 | 4.9 (1.1) | 4.6 (1.1) | 4.4 (1.2) | 4.4 (1.2) | 4.5 (1.0) | 4.5 (1.0) |
Note. All items are scored 1 to 7, with higher scores indicating greater exposure or capability. The composite resilience index is the mean of the flexibility, redundancy, visibility and collaboration sub-scales.
The composite index was computed as the unweighted mean of the four capability sub-scales. For food processors, for example, the composite is (4.6 + 4.9 + 4.4 + 4.5) / 4 = 18.4 / 4 = 4.6. Differences in the composite across firm types were statistically significant, F(3, 214) = 18.7, p < .001. The gap between retail and foodservice firms and primary producers was the largest in the sample; using the pooled standard deviation, the standardised difference is
d = (5.0 – 3.7) / 0.91 = 1.3 / 0.91 = 1.43,
a large effect by conventional benchmarks. Correlational analysis clarified how the capabilities related to outcomes. The composite index was positively associated with self-rated recovery speed (r = .41, p < .001), as were visibility (r = .37) and collaboration (r = .30). Consistent with the redundancy-efficiency tension, redundancy was negatively associated with self-rated cost efficiency (r = -.26, p < .01), indicating that the firms holding the largest buffers also judged themselves the least cost-efficient.
Interview themes
Reflexive thematic analysis produced five themes, summarised in Table 2. Managers described climate and freight exposure as concentrated and recurring rather than exceptional, echoing the survey’s exposure scores; one producer observed that recent floods had “stopped being a once-in-a-career event and started being a line in the budget” (Participant 4). Redundancy was consistently framed as costly insurance, valued in principle but difficult to justify against thin margins, particularly upstream. Biosecurity emerged as an escalating structural risk, with several managers reframing incursions as an ongoing operating condition rather than a remote contingency. Relational capital and coordination featured strongly, with trust, information sharing and code-governed dealings described as a partial substitute for capital-intensive buffers. Finally, managers reported an uneven distribution of visibility and forecasting capability, concentrated among larger downstream firms with the resources to invest in control-tower systems.
Table 2: Themes from reflexive thematic analysis of interviews (n = 15)
| Theme | Description | Participants reporting (n) |
|---|---|---|
| Concentrated climate and freight exposure | Flood inundation of growing regions and severed east-west corridors experienced as recurring rather than exceptional | 13 |
| Redundancy as costly insurance | Buffer stock and spare capacity valued in principle but hard to justify against thin operating margins | 15 |
| Biosecurity as escalating structural risk | Incursions and disease threats reframed as an ongoing operating condition demanding standing capability | 11 |
| Relational capital and coordination | Trust, information sharing and code-governed dealings substituting for capital-intensive buffers | 12 |
| Uneven visibility and forecasting | Control-tower and forecasting investment concentrated among larger downstream firms | 10 |
Discussion
The findings answer the first research question directly: disruption exposure is not evenly distributed across the Australian food sector but concentrated upstream. Primary producers sit closest to the climate and biosecurity shocks that dominate the sector’s risk profile, absorbing flood inundation at the paddock and the front-line consequences of incursions managed under the national biosecurity response (DAFF 2022; CSIRO & Bureau of Meteorology 2022). That producers combine the highest exposure with the lowest resilience capability is the central and most troubling result of the study, since it locates the sector’s greatest weakness precisely where its exposure is greatest.
The second research question concerns how capabilities vary and how they relate to recovery. The downstream gradient in Table 1 is consistent with the capability literature: visibility and collaboration, the capabilities most strongly associated with recovery in this study, were concentrated among retailers, foodservice operators and distributors whose scale and logistics orientation support investment in monitoring and coordination (Jüttner & Maklan 2011). The positive association between collaboration and recovery, and between collaboration and flexibility, supports the argument that relational competencies build resilience independently of physical buffers (Wieland & Wallenburg 2013). It also indicates that resilience is, in part, a dynamic and relational capability rather than a simple stock of inventory (Ambulkar, Blackhurst & Grawe 2015).
The third research question, concerning the reconciliation of redundancy and efficiency, is illuminated by the negative correlation between redundancy and cost efficiency and by the interview account of redundancy as costly insurance. The pattern is precisely the trade-off that Sheffi and Rice (2005) describe, and it helps explain why producers, whose margins are compressed by the bargaining asymmetries the ACCC has documented, score lowest on redundancy despite facing the highest exposure (ACCC 2020). Rather than fund buffers they cannot afford, many upstream firms substitute relational capital, coordinating with trading partners and relying on the more balanced dealings that governance instruments such as the Food and Grocery Code are intended to support (Emerson 2024). This substitution is consistent with Christopher and Peck’s (2004) preference for flexibility and coordination over costly redundancy, and with the principle that capability should be matched to exposure rather than maximised (Pettit, Croxton & Fiksel 2019). The implication for policy is that resilience in the food sector cannot be secured firm by firm alone; it depends on freight and biosecurity systems managed at the national level (Commonwealth of Australia 2019; Productivity Commission 2021).
Several limitations qualify these conclusions. The survey is cross-sectional, so the associations between capabilities and recovery cannot be interpreted causally. All measures are self-reported, and self-rated recovery and efficiency are imperfect proxies for objective performance. The sample, although spanning the value chain and all mainland jurisdictions, was recruited partly through industry associations and may over-represent more engaged firms. Finally, firm type was defined by principal value-chain position and does not capture vertically integrated operations that span several stages.
Conclusion
This dissertation examined disruption exposure and resilience capabilities across the Australian food sector and the tension between redundancy and efficiency that shapes them. It found that exposure and capability are inversely distributed along the value chain: primary producers face the greatest exposure to floods, biosecurity incursions and freight disruption yet hold the weakest resilience capabilities, while downstream retailers, foodservice operators and distributors combine lower exposure with stronger visibility and collaboration. The redundancy-efficiency trade-off is not resolved uniformly but managed according to a firm’s resources, with well-capitalised downstream firms funding buffers and margin-constrained producers substituting relational capital and coordination. Resilience in the Australian food sector is therefore distributed unequally and built as much through relationships as through inventory. Strengthening it will require attention not only to individual firms but to the national freight and biosecurity systems, and the market governance, that condition what each firm can afford to do. Longitudinal and objective-outcome research would help to confirm the causal pathways suggested here.
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