The Significance of Consumer’s Awareness about Organic Food Products in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

Awareness about negative externalities generated by conventional farming is gaining momentum with consumers around the world, opting for alternatively, namely organically, produced food products. Information about consumers' awareness is an essential element for farmers and marketing agencies to successfully plan production that can capture a greater market share. This study discusses effective factors influencing consumers' awareness about the benefits of organic food in the United Arab Emirates. Sample data and ordinary least square (OLS) regression techniques are applied to delineate factors influencing consumers' awareness about organic food. The results from this regression analysis highlight the importance of specific socioeconomic determinants that change awareness about organic food products in United Arab Emirates (UAE) households. This study finds that awareness about organic food is influenced more effective factors such as gender, nationality, and education as well as income, occupation and age. These research findings apply to other economies and societies that have an increasing per capita spending on organic food, but also where people are highly sensitive to information provided about organic food. Therefore, these results are important to these research beneficiaries including food marketing planners, researchers, and agricultural and food policy makers.

Consumer purchasing behaviour of organic food in an emerging market

“…Organic food is important for healthy generations. The consumption of this type of food is growing steadily in developed markets (Muhummad, Fathelrahman, & Ullah, 2016) and becoming a trend in emerging markets (Truong et al., 2012). Organic food purchase intention and behaviour have been studied for long by researchers (Rana & Paul, 2017).…”

“…Awareness (or consumer knowledge) of the organic food refers to the understanding of consumers on product characteristics exploration and recognition (Muhummad et al., 2016). In Vietnam, organic buying consumers faced the problem of lack of knowledge of organic food.…”

A Threat of Farmers’ Suicide and the Opportunity in Organic Farming for Sustainable Agricultural Development in India

“…Another study from the consumer side explained that organic farming is a new method to avoid the costs which have been associated with conventional farming and it is considered to have ecology and environment benefits as a whole. Still, the benefits of organic farming are not well known, it will take more time and effort to make organic farming to reach in the center for farmers and consumers [41].…”

Consumers’ Attitudes towards Organic Products and Sustainable Development: A Case Study of Romania

“…In United Arab Emirates, findings indicated that men are more aware of organic products than women [55]. However, research conducted in Indonesia yielded results which indicated that gender fosters different attitudes towards organic products, women being more preoccupied by health and environmental issues than men [32].…”