Resumo

A new quality trend modified the coffee industry in Brazil. Consequently, new supply chains emerged. Some architectures provide a friendly environment to value creation in high-quality coffee production, as the strictly coordinated supply chain of illycaffè company. The Italian company rearranged the specific investment decisions of Brazilian coffee growers. This setting emphasizes the underexplored alignment of quality production and governance mechanisms behind the relationship between the both literatures of supply chain and transaction costs (Williamson, 2008).

The illycaffè supply chain is interpreted as a restrictive supply chain due to high-quality requirements to be a coffee supplier. The firm designed a complex network based on contracts to minimize hold-up problems. Thus as an underexplorated case of supply chain and transaction costs, but a worldwide relevant supply chain in coffee production in terms of quality and coordination, this paper investigates the following research question: what are the determinants to participate in the Brazilian restrictive supply chain of high-quality coffee?

This institutional arrangement describes a strictly coordination mechanisms. The high-quality issue involves specific investments and open room to the traditional hold-up problem (Klein, Crawford & Alchian, 1978). The attributes of asset specificity, uncertainty and incentives should be aligned with the governance structure to avoid these coordination inefficiencies. This setting offers an opportunity to explore the governance issue in terms of quality production according to the Transaction Cost Economics perspective (Williamson, 1985).

This paper adopts an exploratory data analysis through correspondence analysis, factorial analysis, tetrachoric correlation and a probit regression as a confirmatory approach. The model was performed in a survey based on 105 coffee growers interviews.

Theoretically, the findings illustrated that asset specificity, uncertainty and incentives are positively correlated with a more coordinated governance mechanism. The managerial contribution show that to reach high-quality, as a much high requirement level as one of the most worldwide and restrictive coffee supply requires, the coffee grower is oriented by the adoption of post-harvest equipment, outsourcing contracts in services in the different stages in the coffee crop, reputational incentive, manual workforce structure, high education level, coffee crop age and gourmet coffee production.

The investigation highlights that coffee quality is influenced by different perspectives, and that the uniqueness of the manual workforce influence does not remains anymore. Different from some scholars (Vélez, Montoya & Oliveros, 2002, Cárdenas, Tascón, Mejia, 2015) that maintain this argument looking Colombia, this paper shows that the quality achievement is able to other farming production processes, such as specific investments in the post-harvest equipment and in storage activities.

Williamson, O. E. (2008). TCE/Outsourcing: Transaction Cost Economics and Supply Chain Management. Williamson, O. E. (1985). The Economic Intstitutions of Capitalism. Klein, B., Crawford, R. G., & Alchian, A. (1978). Vertical Integration, Appropriable Rents, and the Competitive Contracting Process. Vélez, Z. J., Montoya, G. E., & Oliveros, T. C. (2002). Human factor performance in the coffee harvesting in Colombia. Cárdenas, E. L. M., Táscon, C. E. O., & Mejia, F. A. (2015). A Portable Device to Assist in the Harvest of Coffee in Colombia.