The Politics of Food Labeling and Certification - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 623

food/story/2012-04-29/kashi-natural-claims/54616576/1) . Under such conditions, crit-
ics worry that consumers will increasingly view food labels with suspicion and fatigue.
Together, these caveats raise doubts about whether consumers will wade through the
plethora of standards they encounter in grocery stores and commit sufficient resources
to ethical consumption to make a difference.
Research
To weigh in on these debates, it is helpful to turn to existing empirical research on the
nature and extent of demand for ethically certified food. Research to date does little to
disentangle the particular motivations of ethical shoppers, but it does support the exis-
tence of committed ethical consumers, though this group may be limited in size along
demographic and income lines. The majority of the research has been survey based, but
several recent experimental studies add richness to the literature.
Several surveys show that consumers report themselves to be willing to pay extra for
products made under ethical conditions. In a survey of 808 respondents in Belgium,
consumers reported that they would be willing to pay an average of 10 percent extra for
Fair-Trade coffee. Those willing to pay the highest premium were more idealistic than
others, less socially conventional, and tended to be aged between 31 and 44. Those who
were willing to pay a somewhat lower premium were more idealistic than average but
otherwise not significantly different from the average consumer in socio-demographic
terms (De Pelsmacker et al. 2005). A U.S. survey conducted by the National Bureau of
Economic Research found that roughly 80 percent of individuals claimed to be willing
to pay a premium for an item if they were assured it was made under good working con-
ditions (Elliott and Freeman 2003).
In another survey, a significant majority of respondents felt that if Americans are
using products made by foreign workers, “this creates a moral imperative to ensure
that they are not required to work in harsh or unsafe conditions.” 76% of respondents
from the same survey, 76 percent claimed they would be willing to pay $25 instead of
$20 for a product if “an international organization . . . would check the conditions in a
factory and, if acceptable, give them the right to label their products as not made in a
sweatshop” (PIPA 2000, pp. 36-37). Blend and Ravensway conducted a household sur-
vey to gather data on intentions to purchase eco-labeled apples under varying condi-
tions. Respondents reported that they would be willing to pay more for eco-labeled
apples, though willingness declined as price premium increased (Blend and Ravensway
1999). Loureiro and Lotade conducted a willingness-to-pay survey of grocery shop-
pers, finding that they reported themselves as willing to pay a premium for Fair Trade,
shade-grown, and Organic coffee (Loureiro and Lotade 2005). This growing body of evi-
dence supports the idea that consumers express a willingness to pay extra for ethically
labeled products.
The most critical drawback to self-reported survey data on people's willingness to buy
ethically certified products is that it is subject to social desirability bias, or systematic