Role of labels referring to quality and country of origin in food consumers’ decisions

Szakály, Z. and Soós, M. and Szabó, S. and Szente, V. (2016) Role of labels referring to quality and country of origin in food consumers’ decisions. Acta Alimentaria, 45 (3). pp. 323-330. ISSN 0139-3006

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Abstract

Within a survey made of Hungarian awareness of, attitudes towards, and preferences for food labels and pricing, this study focused on consumers’ reactions to quality and country of origin labels. Data were collected with a standard questionnaire, face-to-face interviews (1000 participants) in the respondents’ home. It became obvious that consumers were looking for information about quality (rating its importance at 4.04) on packages, but information about origin (3.94) and production (3.89) was also important to them. The capability of respondents to spontaneously recall country of origin and quality labels was very limited: 35.5% of all respondents could not name any such labels. The best known label was “Hungarian Product” (30.5%), which was recognized by up to 90% of the respondents after they were shown it. Many consumers were ready to pay premium for products bearing this label (31.7%). According to our results, information about quality is important to consumers, but they do not look for it deliberately, and only a few consumers ascribe a higher value to products with labels bearing this information. There is a pressing need to increase consumers’ confidence for trademarks through dissemination of reliable information.

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