Food Values Applied to Livestock Products

ABSTRACT

Food values have been proposed in previous research as a method of identifying stable constructs of consumer preference. We conducted an online survey of 1950 US respondents using best–worst scaling applying the concept of food values to four specific meat and dairy products: ground beef, beef steak, chicken breast, and milk. We test the applicability of general food values to specific products, while further discovering the nature of heterogeneity of values by defining classes of respondents. Our findings suggest that the general food values previously proposed apply well to specific products of the livestock industry. We also found that the differences between consumer classes were driven primarily by price sensitivity, with many of the most important and least important values remaining the same.

KEYWORDS:

• Best–worst scaling
• consumer preferences
• demand
• food values
• meat
• milk

Notes

¹ Throughout the article to avoid confusion we persistently use the terminology ‘food value’ rather than attribute or characteristic.

² We also considered RPL models with correlated random parameters but likelihood ratio tests on models for each product fail to reject the uncorrelated RPL ultimately presented in Table 3.