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In this paper, we investigate the short-term and long-term effects of the COVID-19 emergency on consumers' decision of changing dietary habit. We used a certified dataset reporting information about 456 Italian consumers during the lockdown in the first wave of the pandemic emergency (April 2020). The survey collected data about changes in food purchases, respondents' mood during the lockdown, conspiracist beliefs, exposure to the virus, and planned food purchasing behavior after the lockdown. We used the data to construct measures of the psychological pressure exerted by the COVID-19 emergency on consumers. We use an endogenous selection regression model to assess the impact of psychological pressure on the decision of changing food purchased. The analysis identified two opposite approaches to change in food purchasing decisions: impulsive approach and reflective approach. The former is associated with a higher probability of changing food purchase but a lower probability to keep the changes in the long run than the latter. Our results suggest that COVID-19 psychological pressure was associated with impulsive approach to buy food. Consequently, food-purchasing behavior is expected to revert to pre-COVID 19 habits when the emergency is over.

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Although in recent decades, meat from hunted wild ungulates has shown interesting results in terms of market opportunities, the scientific literature is still lacking in economic studies concerning the estimation of the meat's value for involved stakeholders. We present an analysis of the evolution of price in the local red deer meat supply chain. This analysis has been conducted through a survey based on in-depth interviews with the stakeholders involved in an Italian local supply chain. Findings derived from this study describe a case study, however, they also represent the potential dynamics of the value of Italian game meat, highlighting that the development of a sustainable local supply chain of this product may represent an economic resource for involved stakeholders.

Even though the European Union has imposed a mandatory labeling system for conventional meats, there is no mandatory labelling scheme for the so called ‘minor meats’ – such as hunted wild game meat (HWGM). Thus, some European countries have implemented voluntary labelling programs certificating the origin of wild game meat. This study uses a discrete choice experiment to: (1) assess consumer preferences for processed meat products (including wild game meat bearing a HWGM label); and (2) investigate whether consumers’ attitudes towards animal welfare affects their food choice behavior for alternative meat products. Data was collected through an online survey conducted in Italy and consumer preferences for HWGM was estimated through a latent class logit model. Overall, results suggest that, even though HWGM label does not exist yet on the Italian market, it is appealing to Italian consumers and it will likely be accepted by the majority of them. However, consumers who are particularly concerned about animal welfare issues and animal rights showed the lowest level of the interest in the hunted game meat product and thus the presence of the HWGM label does not provide any benefit to them. Our findings have important implications for the development of successful marketing strategies and policy intervention in the HWGM sector at a national and European level.

Innovation processes includes social and communicative elements. The role of innovative technology for the development of farming systems is investigated in literature, but only a few studies deal with the influence of networks on the adoption of technologies by farmers. The aim of this paper is to verify if the adoption of smartphones for professional reasons by farmers is influenced by the networks to which farmers belong, the socio-demographic characteristics of the farmers, and their farm’s size. The case study is in the Valtellina valley, a rural mountain area in the north of Italy, where 53 livestock farmers were interviewed. The methodology is based on two steps. First, social network analysis is applied to diagnose the relationships of farmers in terms of connectivity and closeness and to detect the centrality measures of farmers in three different social relationships: production networks, market networks, and information exchange networks. A multiple linear regression model is then applied to test whether centrality measures of the three networks, the farmers’ socio-demographic characters, and the farm’s features drive the adoption of smartphones for professional reasons. Results suggest that the centrality measures in production networks positively drive the adoption of smartphones, while the centrality measures of market and information exchange networks do not have the same effect. At the same time, the farmers’ age negatively affects the use of smartphones for professional reasons, while the size of the herd, and the education and gender of farmers have no significant influence. The study contributes to the debate around the Agricultural Knowledge Innovation System and supports local policies based on the inclusion of farmers in the technological development in rural areas.

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