Do Consumers Pay Attention to the Organic Label When Shopping Organic Food in Italy? - Organic Food and Agriculture: New Trends and Developments in the Social Sciences - page 124

6. Final remarks
In 2010 a new organic labelling was introduced in the European Union in order to increase
the trust among European consumers towards organic food products and communicate
them more environmental signals. The new label is compulsory and used only in those
products which contain at least 95% of the organic agricultural ingredients. The main aim of
new logo is to allow citizens to be more informed and then increase organic consumers'
purchase with related positive economic effects on marginalized and rural areas. Hence, this
paper has investigated the effects of paying attention to organic labelling on the intention to
buy organic food products in Italy and how the intention drives to the final purchase.
Moreover, it has also provided additional evidence regarding those psychological factors
affecting the intention to purchase organic food products.
The results indicate that those consumers who pay attention to organic labeling when
shopping are more likely to be willingness to buy organic food products. In addition,
women and people with high incomes are those who are more likely to use organic labeling.
And thus, they are to be willing to buy organic food products. On the other hand, the degree
of paying attention to organic label is strongly and positively linked to the degree of
knowledge. The results show that increasing organic knowledge is of paramount
importance to increase the attention paid by consumers to organic label. As the Theory of
Planned Behavior states, findings also show that other factors explain the intention to
purchase organic food products such as attitudes towards their purchase. Consumers with
positive attitudes towards the purchase are more likely to be willing to buy organic food. In
particular, consumers who support buying organic foods are more likely to be willing to
purchase them. However, in contrast with previous studies, the intention to purchase of
Italian consumers is not affected by subjective norms or environmental attitudes when
shopping. Finally, ethical dimension is considered one of main factors driving organic food
purchases because Italian consumers who feel the ethical obligation to choose organic food
products are the ones that finally purchase them. These results provide valuable information
on consumers' purchase behavior of organic food products to help policy makers at
European, National and Regional level. In particular, the results are very useful for policy
makers when designing their respective organic farming policies for Italy. First, policy
makers should take into account that household income still represents a barrier which
limits the expansion of organic food products in the Italian market. Therefore, they should
strongly support organic farmers by substantial subventions in order to decrease their costs
of certifications and lead them to be more competitive in food market. Second, our study
confirms the results of previous studies which showed that organic knowledge represents a
key issue that organic farmers have to take into account in order to sell their products. To
illustrate, organic food products should be supported by investments in promotion actions
which will result in easy identifiable by consumers trough new organic labeling providing
consumers more information of other organic food characteristics, such as the percentage of
organic ingredients, animal welfare and GMOs free. Finally, since ethical aspects in organic
food purchase influences consumers´ purchase decisions of organic food, future
informational campaigns and promotion actions will also focus on making consumers more
aware of the ethical dimension of organic food products. In particular, they also
communicate the economic and environmental benefits on context where organic farmers
operate in terms of the improvement of farmers' incomes and retaining population.