Sustainability Labels on Food Products: Consumer Motivation, Understanding and Use

By K. Grunert, S. Hieke, Josephine Wills. 2014

1,235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study investigates the relationship between consumer motivation, understanding and use of sustainability labels on food products (both environmental and ethical labels), which are increasingly appearing on food products. Data was collected by means of an online survey implemented in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Poland, with a total sample size of 4408 respondents. Respondents expressed medium high to high levels of concern with sustainability issues at the general level, but lower levels of concern in the context of concrete food product choices. Understanding of the concept of sustainability was limited, but understanding of four selected labels (Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Carbon Footprint, and Animal Welfare) was better, as some of them seem to be self-explanatory. The results indicated a low level of use, no matter whether use was measured as self-reported use of different types of information available on food labels or as use inferred from the results of a choice-based conjoint analysis. Hierarchical regression indicated that use is related to both motivation and understanding, and that both motivation, understanding and use are affected by demographic characteristics, human values as measured by the Schwartz value domains, and country differences. The results imply that sustainability labels currently do not play a major role in consumers’ food choices, and future use of these labels will depend on the extent to which consumers’ general concern about sustainability can be turned into actual behaviour.

Subfields: Marketing, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2425b1f0dd0ec4b9ede37fe097a09f3ebfb4301a

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Citations in the corpus

Should we stop meating like this? Reducing meat consumption through substitution (2016, background): “…can be effective tools for communicating important information such as nutrition characteristics, carbon footprint and country of origin, as a stand-alone intervention they may be ineffective at changing consumer behaviour (Boztuğ et al., 2015; Grunert et al., 2014; Gadema and Oglethorpe, 2011).”
Green Consumerism: Moral Motivations to a Sustainable Future (2015, background): “Similarly fairtrade products, while better for the environment, may be motivated by other factors such as general concern for the welfare of the fieldworkers [63].”
From Short Food Supply Chains to Sustainable Agriculture in Urban Food Systems: Food Democracy as a Vector of Transition (2016, background): “This idea leads to a second line of discussion: to what extent can labels realign behaviors along social and/or environmental objectives [67]? On one hand, some research has indicated consumers’ limited use of eco-labels, especially when these consumers are not much concerned by the sustainability i”
Food Labeling and Eco-Friendly Consumption: Experimental Evidence From a Belgian Supermarket (2014, background): “Many consumers however give little thought to the links 8 between their consumption and the environmental impact of food production (Grunert et al., 2014; 9 de Boer et al. 2009).”