Biases in consumers' assessment of environmental damage in food chains and how investments in reputation can help

Abstract

Sustainability is becoming increasingly relevant to consumers in their food choices. However, they may have a limited understanding of the environmental impact of their purchasing decisions and resort to perceptions and heuristics to guide them. In this study, consumers were asked to complete a categorisation task to determine whether they considered a product to have a high or low carbon footprint, with no information besides that contained on the product's front label. The results demonstrated that raw materials (food category), transportation (UK product), and manufacturing (level of processing) influenced the probability that an item would be classified as either having a low or high carbon footprint. These findings are embedded into the supply chain to explore the role of reputation in reducing the categorisation biases observed in the categorisation task.