Fieldwork for data collection was conducted between
February and April 2006 in Costa Rica. We conducted 51
structured interviews regarding product management practices
and made a laboratory analysis of mango quality. Information
was collected amongst three types of agents in
the mango supply chain: (a) producers’ organizations directly
delivering to export markets (N ¼ 19), (b) traders,
providing linkages between local producers and local markets
(N ¼ 18), and (c) domestic retailers delivering to national
consumers’ markets (N ¼ 14). Primary respondents
were selected using snowball sampling (Babbie, 1992).
Discriminant analysis is used to assess whether the agents
were effectively classified into homogeneous groups