Effect of Environmental and Altruistic Attitudes on Willingness-to-Pay for Organic and Fair Trade Coffee in Flanders

Leonard Maaya,Nick Surmont,Michel Meulders,Martina Vandebroek

doi:10.3390/su10124496

Abstract

Sustainability labels, on food products, provide information to consumers that the product has been produced in an ethical and environmentally friendly way. We explore the knowledge and purchasing behaviour of the organic label and fair trade label. Secondly, we investigate the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for food products bearing organic and fair trade labels. Thirdly, we examine the effects of demographic characteristics and environmental and altruistic attitudes on WTP for both organic and fair trade labels. Lastly, we evaluate the correlation in WTP for organic and fair trade labels. We draw our conclusions by analyzing a stated choice experiment on consumers’ coffee buying behaviour in Flanders, Belgium. Our results suggest that knowledge of the fair trade label is higher than that of the organic label. The importance of the organic and fair trade labels on coffee purchase decisions, as well as their WTP estimates, were similar. We found a high correlation in WTP for both labels. Our results indicate significant effects of environmental and altruistic attitudes on WTP for both organic and fair trade labels as they apply to coffee.

Highlights

Ethical and environmentally conscious consumers continuously rely on sustainability labels found on products to choose food products that have been produced and processed in a sustainable way [1,2,3]
Our results indicate significant effects of environmental and altruistic attitudes on WTP for both organic and fair trade labels as they apply to coffee
In Rousseau’s study which assessed recognition of fair trade and organic labels in Flanders (Belgium), 60% of the respondents correctly identified fair trade compared to the 78% we found

Summary

Introduction

Ethical and environmentally conscious consumers continuously rely on sustainability labels found on products to choose food products that have been produced and processed in a sustainable way [1,2,3]. These labels are especially important on a product’s credence attributes, which can neither be observed pre-purchasing nor be experienced post-purchase. The unbounded increase has fanned consumer confusion on what respective labels aim to address [4,5,6,7] It has increased the information burden on food products that consumers have to process before deciding which product to purchase. Consumers often limit their reliance on these labels [6,8] in making their choices

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Results

Conclusion