Explore Chinese consumers' safety perception of agricultural products using a non-price choice experiment

Abstract

Consumers' food safety perception is a key driver of their food buying decision. However, little is known about how consumers judge the food safety of agricultural products with a variety of extrinsic indicators in the market. Different from previous studies that directly ask about consumers' overall food safety perception, we designed a non-price choice experiment of general agricultural products to examine the impact of extrinsic indicators on consumers' food safety perception. The design without price attributes and takes agricultural products as a whole can overcome preference reversal caused by prices and provide policymakers with important information to establish effective food safety communication programs. With online survey data (n = 1281), results indicate that factors influencing consumers' food safety perception include Green Food certification (54%), purchase venue (42%), and brand (4%). These results imply that brand has a relatively weak linkage with food safety and is not an effective indicator for food safety. Besides, using seemingly unrelated regression, we found that high food safety risk perception may not necessarily lead to the use of food safety indicators. However, the trust in Green Food certification does matter, suggesting trust is the foundation of food safety communication. This study provides deep insight into consumers' formulation of food safety perception, which is essential to improving food safety communication.