The purpose of the study is to examine the current situation in the food processing sector in Tirana/Albania regarding the quality management systems and the availability of information regarding quality and safety of the food and beverage products, in decision-making for improving the quality of the products. The specific goal of the study is to provide information for policy-makers in the field of agro-industry (food industry), on one hand, and on the other hand, also to provide some information, related to the quality assurance systems (QA), for the managerial staff of food industry enterprises to help them in orienting their decisions towards improving the quality management. A stratified random sampling was applied for selecting the sample of enterprises 35 out of 120 (official number from the Ministry of Agriculture Food and Consumer Protection in Albania) with the number of employees more than four. We constructed a questionnaire and a face to face interview was conducted for gathering the data. A descriptive statistics and regression methodology was used for the study in order to present and describe a picture of the food and beverage industry in Tirana district. We draw a general conclusion that there is an association between applying the quality management standards and operational markets. The test analysis shows that there is a significant association between applying the quality management standards and operational markets, the Fisher’s exact test 0.001 < 0.05. Only a small percentage of enterprises (around 23% out of 35 included in the survey) have established the quality management systems in Tirana, while 77% do not apply these standards, despite the source of information gathering that all enterprises orient their production towards the consumer preferences.
Assessing the situation of food and beverage enterprises regarding the implementation of the quality management systems (Case of Tirana/Albania)