Certification as Minimum Threshold

Certification systems in food and agriculture confirm that a product or process meets a defined threshold — organic, fair trade, food safety, geographic indication. This paper examines the structural gap between what certification confirms and what buyers, institutions, and consumers need to understand about a product. Certification establishes admissibility. It does not establish intelligibility. A product can hold multiple certifications and remain poorly understood at the product-information level. The paper documents where product-level disclosure is lost between the certification event and the downstream decision point.