Our own country is best: Factors influencing consumers’ sustainability perceptions of plant-based foods

Abstract

Sustainability is becoming increasingly important in consumers’ food choices. Although consumers are known to rely on certain strategies for choosing sustainable food, such as preferring local and organic products, the extent to which these strategies affect the sustainability assessment of foods remains unknown.In an online experiment with 305 respondents from the German-speaking Swiss population, we examined how consumers evaluated the sustainability of foods that differed by production country, labelling and seasonality. Participants rated bell peppers, apples, coffee, peppermint tea and sugar on both their environmental impact and social sustainability.Swiss products (i.e. pepper, apple and peppermint tea) were rated more positively on both factors than products from other countries, and distance to the production country seemed to partly influence perceptions of both environmental impacts and social sustainability. The presence of either organic or fair-trade labels significantly decreased the perceived environmental impact and increased the perceived social benefits of both coffee and sugar. No significant differences were found between the labels regarding the foods’ perceived environmental impact, but the products’ social sustainability perception differed between the two labels. Seasonality had a significant but minor effect on the perceived environmental impact.To conclude, Swiss consumers mainly relied on an ‘our own country is best’ heuristic and on sustainability labels to evaluate the environmental impact and social sustainability of food products. While this strategy can result in rather accurate sustainability estimations, it can also result in systematic mistakes. It is recommended to address these misconceptions to enable consumers to make better sustainable food choices.