Are Consumers Willing to Pay for Local Chicken Breasts and Pork Chops?

ABSTRACT

Consumer definitions of and demand for locally produced meat were collected via an online survey of 625 U.S. residents. Consumer choice experiments were utilised to elicit willingness to pay for locally produced chicken breasts and pork chops. Younger respondents, respondents without a college degree, participants in hunting and fishing and those who have altered their total meat consumption in the past 3 years due to food safety or animal welfare concerns more frequently report that local food is produced within 10 or 20 miles of their home. Results indicate that respondents are willing to pay a positive amount (at the mean) for verified local production of chicken breasts but not pork chops.

KEYWORDS:

• Chicken attributes
• consumer preferences
• local meats
• pork attributes

Notes

¹ A proprietary opt-in database, Lightspeed GMI, was used to identify and contact survey respondents. The online survey was developed, pre-tested, and hosted by Purdue University using the Qualtrics survey platform. In order to participate in the survey, respondents had to first indicate that they were 18 years of age or older.

² Including a certification entity is consistent with the notion that “local” is a credence attribute, and it is unlikely that such a claim would be made in a retail setting without some type of verification or certification (Olynk & Ortega, 2013; Olynk et al., 2010).

³ Prices were selected to be consistent with the USDA Weekly Retail Chicken and Pork Feature Activity Publications at the time of survey administration.

⁴ Consistent with a real-world shopping experience where products with animal welfare claims are marketed with a certification, the respondents were never shown unverified attributes.

⁵ Effects coding is used to avoid confounding effects of the absence of attributes with the “no purchase” option. Whereas regular dummy variables are coded 0 or 1, effects coding take on the values 0, 1, or −1. The attribute is given a value of 1 when the attribute is present, −1 when the base category or the attribute is not present, and 0 otherwise (Ouma, Abdulai, & Drucker, 2007; Tonsor, Olynk, & Wolf, 2009).

⁶ The table of coefficients and standard deviations was omitted for brevity, but is available upon request.

⁷ A modified RPL model which accounted for whether respondents defined local as within 10 or 20 miles versus defining local as within 50 miles, 100 miles, or within state was investigated. However, WTP estimates did not differ between these groups for all WTP estimates for chicken breasts and pork chops.