Abstract
Carbon labeling describes carbon dioxide emissions across food lifecycles, contributing to enhancing consumers’ low-carbon awareness and promoting low-carbon consumption behaviors. In a departure from the existing literature on carbon labeling that heavily relies on interviews or questionnaire surveys, this study forms a hybrid of an auction experiment and a consumption experiment to observe university students’ purchase intention and willingness to pay for a carbon-labeled food product. In this study, students from a university in a city (Chengdu) of China, the largest carbon emitter, are taken as the experimental group, and cow’s milk is selected as the experimental food product. The main findings of this study are summarized as follows: (1) the purchase of carbon-labeled milk products is primarily influenced by price; (2) the willingness to pay for carbon-labeled milk products primarily depends on the premium; and (3) the students are willing to accept a maximum price premium of 3.2%. This study further offers suggestions to promote the formation of China’s carbon product-labeling system and the marketization of carbon-labeled products and consequently facilitate low-carbon consumption in China.
Highlights
84.6% of the participants purchased the carbon-labeled milk, and the other 15.4% bought the non-carbon-labeled milk. This indicates that university students were more inclined to buy the carbon-labeled milk
This study sequentially implemented focus group discussions, an auction experiment, and a field consumption experiment to determine factors influencing the purchase of carbon-labeled products
When the price premium increased from 0.1 Yuan to 0.2 Yuan, an apparent decrease in the carbon-labeled milk sales was witnessed, which suggests that multiple premium points might cause a sudden change in purchase intention
Summary
Carbon labeling (or carbon emission labeling), which describes carbon dioxide emissions across food lifecycles and provides a sustainability credential, is conducive to enhancing consumers’ low-carbon awareness and promoting low-carbon consumption behaviors. It helps to mitigate food’s environmental impacts and improve food sustainability [3,4,5,6]. As expected, carbon-labeled (more broadly, eco-labeled, sustainability-labeled) products often involve price premiums. Put another way, products with carbon labels have a higher price than those without such labels, due in part to extra costs of low-carbon certification and technologies
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