The article investigates the dynamics of criminality in the food industry with two main goals: (i)
to highlight how the criminological characteristics of these markets could impact on the fair
distribution of criminal liability between individuals and collective entities; (ii) to suggest – in a
cross-cutting perspective with respect to the various legal systems – solutions that could help
regulators to structure mechanisms of criminal enforcement against food crimes able to address
the real causes of such illegal conduct. Our contention is that only by putting legal persons at
the centre of the punitive system for food crimes in the future it will be possible to guarantee an
effective response against very serious criminal phenomena which, in the recent past, have not
always received a strong response on the repressive side.