Fresh-Cut Melon—The Money Is in the Juice

Abstract

Fruit is an important component of the food industry in the United States, and “fresh-cut” products are an increasing portion of that consumption. We found that packaging and juice content played a significant role in the choices Indiana consumers made when purchasing fresh-cut melon products. Brand was not as important as the other fresh-cut melon attributes. Indiana consumers had a clear dislike for cup-shaped transparent packages compared with tamper-proof, bowl, and squared packages. However, they were willing to pay a premium for packages that have no fruit juices on the bottom.

Consumer Characteristics and Willingness to Pay for Locally Produced Product: A Case Study of Rib-eye Steaks in the Northern Great Plains

“…We assume that consumer i will make a discrete choice among j mutually exclusive alternatives in each choice set to maximize her or his utility (Louviere et al, 2000;Mayen, Marshall, & Lusk, 2007;Nganje, Hughner, & Lee, 2011). Given that ij ε is a stochastic random error, Equation (1) can be written as:…”

“…For example, a consumer's WTP for a locally produced steak (brand attribute), as compared to a steak bearing a national brand label, is the price difference between the locally produced and the national brand steaks. Mathematically, we can measure the WTP by applying the following formula (Mayen et al, 2007): (3)), we should conclude this WTP as statistically insignificant (i.e., indifferent from zero). However, we suggest readers to be cautious in interpreting any estimated WTP that is statistically indifferent from zero.…”

“…The second step in creating our study's survey was to design a questionnaire to which respondents could easily and correctly respond (Mayen et al, 2007). The questionnaire in this study contained two parts.…”

“…The probability that any individual i will choose the j alternative over all other k options from a given choice set C is the probability that the utility of choosing that alternative is greater than the resulting utility from other k options (Mayen et al, 2007;McFadden, 1974):…”

“…Accordingly, the probability of an individual i choosing alternative j is given by (Mayen et al, 2007):…”