Eliciting Egg Consumer Preferences for Organic Labels and Omega 3 Claims in Italy and Hungary.

Davide Menozzi,Áron Török,Ching-Hua Yeh

doi:10.3390/foods9091212

Abstract

This paper investigates consumers’ preferences for egg purchase in two European countries, Hungary and Italy. We utilize random parameter logit models to interpret the results of discrete choice experiments (DCE) for the elicitation of preference of the egg consumers. A sample of 403 in the Hungarian survey and 404 in the Italian survey were recruited in summer 2018. The DCE questionnaire includes the following product and process characteristics: organic labels, nutrition and health claims, and price. Our results show that for Hungarian and Italian consumers, the price is the most important attribute, followed by the nutrition and health claim and the organic production labelling. Three egg consumer segments can be identified via latent class models for each country. In both countries, we found similar consumer groups, the Price Sensitive and Quality Optimizing Opportunist Consumers and Health Conscious Buyers, respectively. Particularly, compared to the other segments the Health Conscious Buyers (46% in Hungary and 49% in Italy) exhibited stronger preference for and are willing to pay a higher price premium for eggs with organic label and nutrition claims. In Italy, we identified a third segment with consumers preferring simpler labelling approach, whilst in Hungary we found a consumer segment distrusting the EU organic logo.

Highlights

In the European Union (EU), organic food must comply with the principles of organic production, certification and labelling of Regulation (EU) 2018/848 of the European Parliament and of the Council
This paper first aims to assess consumers’ attitude towards, interest to, and willingness to pay for differentiated eggs with respect to production methods and nutrition and health claims, in two European countries, Hungary and Italy
Our results find that the standard deviation of the random parameters are statistically significant across countries, which implies that there is a substantial heterogeneity in preference regarding the respective characteristics when purchasing eggs across consumers, which can be considered an informative indication because it may lead to a beneficial segmentation strategy

Summary

Introduction

Organic Labelled Foods in the European Union. In the European Union (EU), organic food must comply with the principles of organic production, certification and labelling of Regulation (EU) 2018/848 of the European Parliament and of the Council. Since the first European organic regulation (Council Regulation EEC 2092/91 of 24 June 1991), organic food production plays an essential role in both the EU’s food quality systems and rural development. Regulation (EU) No 271/2010, is compulsory for all the pre-packed organic foods and voluntary for non-pre-packed foods. Besides the EU logo, in several European countries other voluntary organic certification labels are managed by different organizations, e.g., the French “AB—agriculture biologique”, or the national “Bio”—label in Germany. According to recent surveys by the European Commission [1,2,3,4], generally

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