Assessing consumer demand for food quality certification: case of “HACCP certified eggs”

Abstract

This study was aimed to identify the key food quality attributes that the consumers take into account as they purchase essential food items, in general, and eggs in particular, and extent to which the provision of information augments the consumer demand for "HACCP-certified eggs". It uses the attributes categorized in 'Caswell's Classification on Food Quality' under different subsets, i.e.: Food safety, Nutrition, Sensory, Value, Process, Text and Cues, and in another classification based on the level of information use by a consumer, i.e.: Search, Experience and Credence to develop the analytical framework. Data were collected from a sample of educated, middle-income urban consumers (n=200) from Kurunegala and Colombo districts from March-April 2015 through personal interviews carried out with the aid of a structured questionnaire and various flyers designed for the purpose. The results showed that consumers rank the "Label" (83.5%), "Price" (49.5%) and "Purity" (40%) attributes as the most important as they purchase an essential food item; yet, for the case of eggs, "Appearance" (75.5%) ranked the first followed by "Purity" (69.5%) and "Price" (30.5%). This highlights that consumer demand for eggs is mainly decided by Search (e.g. appearance, purity) and Experience (e.g. weight, place of origin) attributes of quality. However, it revealed that product certification, which is used extensively with the food items like meat, fish, sea food and milk to signal the compliance of the product with Credence attributes, plays an insignificant role with regard to eggs. The outcome of analysis, overall, suggests that, from a food economics point of view, HACCP-certified eggs is not 'value for money' for an average consumer as the price premium paid for such does not compensate for the marginal benefit obtained through the "augmented quality".