Consumer Demand for Food Quality: A Study Exploring the Search, Experience and Credence Attributes of Powdered Milk

Abstract

Utilizing the Caswell classification on food quality (i.e. Safety, Nutrition, Value, Process, Package) and the use of information by a consumer (i.e. Search, Experience, Credence) as the theoretical base, this study examines empirically the key food quality attributes that consumers take into account as they purchase powdered milk in the marketplace. A Choice Modeling framework was applied to reveal consumers' preferences and their willingness-to-pay for different food quality attributes. Data were collected by way of a personal interview carried out with 134 consumers from urban households located within the Colombo and Galle city limits during March to April 2015 and convenient sampling techniques were applied to select the candidates with varying socio-economic conditions, including education, income and age. The outcome of analysis suggests that consumers concern about certain common attributes such as 'size of the packet' (i.e. 400g) and the ‘level of fat' in the product over the other attributes. In fact, they place low value on those pertaining to food safety (e.g. pathogens, toxins, food additives) and nutrition (e.g. calories, vitamins) attributes. The outcome, as a whole, justifies the fact that consumers are "confident" on the status of attributes showing Credence characteristics in milk powder, because they trust the 'third party certification' and 'information labels' as reliable means of transforming those "unseen" Credence attributes into Search and Experience attributes; thus, they do not need to worry ex-ant