The role of certificate issuer on consumers’ willingness‐to‐pay for milk traceability in China

Abstract

In response to increasing concerns about domestic food safety issues, establishing tracking systems in the food industry is mandatorily required under newly launched food safety laws. However, the kinds of monitoring and certification systems that should be set up to ensure practical adoption and the effectiveness of the regulation remain unclear. This study aims to analyze consumers' preferences for milk traceability, with particular interest in investigating how consumers' preferences could be affected by monitoring and certification systems of the regarding system. Survey data from a choice-based conjoint (CBC) experiment are used to achieve this objective. In the experiment, milk is defined by a set of attributes in which we assume that milk traceability can be certified by three entities: the government, an industrial association, and a third party. The CBC data are then analyzed by using the alternative-specific form of a conditional Logit (McFadden's Choice) model. We found that urban Chinese consumers have a strong desire for traceable milk, but their preference for traceable milk is significantly related to the associated certificate issuers. Currently, the highest willingness-to-pay goes to government certificated traceable milk, followed by industrial association certificated and third-party certificated milks. In the future, however, consumers are likely to give more credit to third-party certification with rising income and knowledge.JEL classifications: D12, Q18

Chinese consumers’ preferences and willingness to pay for traceable food quality and safety attributes: The case of pork

“…In the same age group, consumers with high education and income levels had a high relative WTP for domestic third-party certification (Table 7). This finding has certain similarities with the conclusion of Bai et al (2013) that consumers have increasingly high confidence in third-party certification agencies as their education and future income improve. At the same income level, highly educated consumers had a low WTP for "government certification" and a high one for "domestic third-party certification."…”

Qualitative and quantitative cues in consumers' valuation of food safety: Evidence from Lebanon

“…Furthermore, trust is not only in the information itself, but also in the source providing the information. The role of consumers' trust has been explored in studies on food safety in developed countries which have reported relatively high levels of confidence in the government in some countries (Bai, Zhang, & Jiang, 2013;Food Standards Agency, 2015), and a lack of public trust in governmental agencies as well as industries in others (Frewer, Howard, Hedderley, & Shepherd, 1996). One important aspect that could help with minimizing the gap in trust may be the reduction of asymmetry in information through comprehensive and transparent risk communication.…”

Traceability information modeling and system implementation in Chinese domestic sheep meat supply chains

“…An effective traceability system should include collecting and handling the comprehensive information and promoting mutual information exchange among farmers, producers, distributors, and consumers. It can extract, store, and transmit adequate information at all stage (production, processing, transportation, storage, inspection, supervision, and consumption) in meat supply chain (Bai, Zhang, & Jiang, ; Lavelli, ). Thus, the most challenge for efficiency and effectiveness traceability system development is how to capture accurate and reliable traceability information on meat quality throughout the production process, understand the complete link information tracking between consumers and the operations executed at the operational level, but also conduct quality monitoring and strategic decision‐making at the management level (Tao & Peng, ; Thakur, Sørensen, Bjørnson, Forås, & Hurburgh, ).…”

“…At present, stakeholders in the meat industry have implemented traceability mainly to improve product flow, control product quality, and limit security scandals (Vol, 2004;Winn et al, 2015). Researches on traceability covers a range of topics: traceability system development (Donnelly, Karlsen, & Olsen, 2009;Feng, Fu, Wang, Xu, & Zhang, 2013;Marchi, Penasa, Cecchinato, & Bittante, 2013;Song, Liu, Wang, & Nanseki, 2008;Xiao, Fu, Zhang, Peng, & Zhang, 2017;Zhang, Fu, Xiao, Zhang, & Li, 2017); traceability modeling (Liang, Cao, Fan, Zhu, & Dai, 2015;Zhang, Lv, Xu, & Mu, 2010); consumers' willingness to pay for traceability (Bai et al, 2013;Mørkbak, Christensen, & Gyrd-Hansen, 2011;Wu et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2016;Zhang, Bai, & Wahl, 2012). Some researches on sheep meat traceability have also been conducted and introduced several mechanisms.…”