Japanese consumer preferences for additive-free wine labeling

Abstract

Consumers have recently become more concerned about food additives and food safety. Since its first meeting on September 17, 2003, the Risk Communication Expert Committee has studied and discussed the ideal methods to communicate risk related to food safety issues in response to a Food Safety Commission request. However, there are only a few case studies that actually apply to risk communications. This study aims to analyze consumer preferences for antioxidantfree wine and suggest a tool for risk communications. The study uses a two-stage method: in the first, the analysis identified different types of consumers according to their views of antioxidant-free labels using structural equation model (SEM) analysis; the second stage incorporated the consumer attributes identified by the SEM into a conjoint analysis to calculate willingness to pay (WTP) for each attribute. The WTP results show that the antioxidant-free label has a significant influence on consumer preferences. Notably, consumers who recognize food additive dangers placed significant additional value on wine without antioxidants. On the other hand, consumers who have knowledge of wine and food processing tended to view antioxidant-free wine as low in quality compared to wines made with the original manufacturing process. These results indicate that "adverse selection" has occurred in the wine market in Japan. The results suggest significant differences between consumer groups in terms of awareness of the dangers of food additives and knowledge of wine and food processing. This implies that some consumers are sensitive to food additives. Our research can help regulators create effective means to communication risk related to food additives. In addition, this implies that government guidelines related to wine labels are important, so that Japanese wine may approach international level quality.

Factors affecting consumer preferences for “natural wine”

“…This highlights how the consumers' interest towards natural wine is strongly associated with the desire to consume foods and beverages that do not contain additives and are unprocessed and the desire to preserve the environment and natural resources. With specific reference to health attitudes, measured through NPI attitude scale, our results are consistent with several empirical evidences, which showed a growing attention of consumers towards health aspects, also for the wine, and willing to pay a premium price (D'Amico et al, 2016;Amato et al, 2017;Kubota et al, 2017). Indeed, sustainable wines, among which the organic and natural ones, are considered to be more directly linked to a healthy life style than their conventional counterparts (Galati et al, 2019;Sirieux and Remaud, 2010).…”

“…In fact, while some authors find a scarce willingness, among consumers, to pay for wines without the addition of sulfites (Costanigro et al, 2014), others note a high WTP for these wines (D'Amico et al, 2016) probably because they reported discomfort following the wine consumption with this ingredient added (Amato et al, 2017). Similarly, the provision, on the label, of information on the antioxidant content in the wine negatively influences the WTP of consumers, especially those who recognize food additive dangers (Kubota et al, 2017). The influence of wine ingredients on the WTP of consumers has been demonstrated also by Ghvanidze et al, (2017), according to which, consumers who are concerned about healthy diets were found to be more willing to trade off product attributes regarding low carbohydrates in wine and a WTP for such category of wine.…”

Nutritional Knowledge and Health Consciousness: Do They Affect Consumer Wine Choices? Evidence from a Survey in Italy

“…Specifically, the literature on consumer wine choices has focused on 'clean' labels related to aspects such as organic, biodiversity friendly, and biodynamic wine production processes [69][70][71][72], harvesting techniques, and the absence of additives [73][74][75][76]. This literature confirms the link between naturalness and health [77,78].…”

Analysing the Extent of Awareness of Millennial Generation Regarding the Likely Effects of Food Additives

“…On the other hand, lack of familiarity with food ingredients increases the perceived risks by consumers (Aschemann-Witzela, Varelab, & Peschela, 2019). Kubota, Sawano, & Kono (2017) find that the awareness of consumers on health risks of wine additives and their knowledge on food and wine processing reversely affect their preferences. Consumers who are aware of the dangers of wine additives prefer antioxidant-free wines.…”