An Analysis of Consumers’ Preferences between Locally Grown/Processed Food and Organic Food

Abstract

Consumer selectivity when buying food, due to concerns for food safety, personal health, and environment sustainability, has led to the growing popularity for “organic” and “local” product labels. Little research has examined consumer preferences and tradeoffs between organic and local when both choices are available. This paper investigates the structure of consumers’ preferences for three separate food groups and measures the relative importance of local versus organic in the context of other desired category-specific product attributes. For all three product groups, local was more important that organic, but other category-specific attributes were more important in a purchase decision.