Willingness to Pay for Locally Grown, Organic and Natural Foods

Download or read book Willingness to Pay for Locally Grown, Organic and Natural Foods written by Kathryn Onken and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of Mid-Atlantic consumers in five states was conducted to determine consumer preference and marginal willingness to pay for the attributes organic, natural, locally grown and state program promoted. The influence of purchasing venue on willingness to pay was examined as well. A key part of this survey was a choice experiment featuring strawberry preserves. The survey also included a variety of questions concerning shopping behavior, awareness and opinion of state marketing programs, and the geographical area that the respondent considered to be local. The results of the choice experiment portion of the survey were analyzed using a conditional logit model and a nested logit model. Marginal willingness to pay figures were calculated from the results of the nested logit model. These results indicated a price premium for preserves purchased at a farmers' market across five Mid-Atlantic states. The organic attribute was only preferred over natural in one state. In addition, the attributes local and state program promoted were preferred over non-local across all states. The preference ordering between local and state program did vary. Consumers in Maryland and Pennsylvania clearly preferred local, while those in New Jersey seemed to prefer the state program version. Overall, findings from this study suggest programs in several states should consider focusing on more generic "buy local" promotions, instead of statewide promotional programs. Additional results indicate that consumers from states other than Delaware consider areas smaller than the borders of their state as being local, such as a county or regional area. The results of this study would be of use to state marketing agencies, producers and processors targeting the Mid-Atlantic region.