Food TNCs, intellectual property investments and post-Fordist food consumption: the case of Unilever and Nestle in Turkey

This article is an attempt to analyze the growing predominance and changing investment strategies of food TNCs (transnational corporations) in the context of a peripheral country, Turkey. My general argument is two-folded. On the one hand, I will demonstrate that exploiting intellectual property (intangible assets) by investing in foreign markets has become an important component of the expansion strategies of food TNCs in the past several decades. On the other hand, I will suggest that this process is closely related to changes in food consumption patterns. In other words, my intention is to show that with the growing segmentation of food consumption markets, intellectual property investments have gained even more significance in the production and marketing decisions of food TNCs, especially in the processed food sector. For this purpose, I will first provide a brief review of the literature on the restructuring of the world agro-food industry after the 1970s and the role of TNCs in this process. Secondly, I will highlight the importance of intellectual property investments and changes in food consumption patterns in this period. I will then briefly summarize the transformation of the Turkish agro-food sector since the 1980s. In the last section, I will concentrate on the activities of two major food TNCs in Turkey, namely Unilever and Nestle, and describe how their investment and marketing strategies have changed and responded to transformations in the consumption sphere. Analyses of the current restructuring of the world agro-food industry are heavily dominated by a core-centric approach. My contention is that for the most part these analyses neglect changes in the investment and marketing strategies of food TNCs in the periphery. This is partly because the growth of trade and foreign direct investment and financial integration, have been concentrated within the global triad of North America, Western Europe and East Asia since the 1980s. Therefore sociological accounts of the globalization of agro-food markets usually focus on these regions and ignore what takes place in other parts of the world. I believe that research on food TNCs would benefit from studies dealing with peripheral countries.