Who cares about meat carbon footprint? Exploring preferences for credence factors among Australian consumers

Abstract

In the climate change context, consumers are often urged to reduce meat consumption because of associated greenhouse gas emissions. However, it is unclear if consumers would pay more for meat with lower carbon footprint, among other credence factors. This paper reports one of the first studies to identify willingness-to-pay for meat that has been carbon-footprint-labelled as an attribute. Four discrete choice experiments are conducted about meat preferences for beef, chicken, lamb and pork, on 1,200 Australian respondents. The results show that credence factors remain less important to most consumers than intrinsic meat properties. Carbon footprint is non-significant in the estimated mixed logit models. Latent class analyses reveal that only one (representing 21% of consumers) out of three classes places high importance on carbon footprint.