Abstract
The European organic food market is characterized by very different consumer segments. There are significant differences concerning motivations for organic food consumption, preferences for various attributes, and frequency of purchase among consumers. Although the organic food sector has been studied for about 20 years, little is known about consumer behavior at different levels of consumption. The aim of this study was to investigate the determinants of organic food consumption in various market segments characterized by different purchasing frequencies. The determinants of purchase frequency in Italy and Germany are analyzed not only at the mean regression, by OLS, but also at the median and at the mode. Differing estimates at these measures of central tendency generally occur with asymmetric distributions, and this occurs in the following analysis as well. Moreover, since in Germany the dependent variable presents more than one peak/mode, interpretation of the mode regression becomes problematic and a different tool is implemented, namely the finite mixture model. The latter clusters the observations in homogeneous groups while computing the regression coefficients within each group. Buyers are split into two groups, frequent and rare consumers of organic food, and two different sets of estimated coefficients explain frequency of purchases within each group.
Highlights
Consumer demand for organic products is growing worldwide (Du et al 2017), and the search for the factors driving organic consumption is assuming increasing importance
This study focuses on the determinants of organic food purchases among buyers with different purchasing frequencies
While we find great homogeneity in the determinants of the demand for organic food across estimators, the estimated coefficients differ according to the estimator implemented
Summary
Consumer demand for organic products is growing worldwide (Du et al 2017), and the search for the factors driving organic consumption is assuming increasing importance. A growing number of authors have underlined the role of attribute perception in the motivation for organic purchases (Yiridoe et al 2005; Krystallis et al 2006; Zander and Hamm 2010; Lee and Yun 2015). Both general and commodity-specific attributes affect consumers’ choices of organic food (Hansen and Andersen 2013). Several attributes are related to consumers’ expression of their identities and life values (Krystallis et al 2012; Hwang et al 2015)
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