Product labelling in the market for organic food: Consumer preferences and willingness-to-pay for different organic certification logos

Product labelling with organic certification logos is a tool for signalling consumers that a product is a certified organic product. In many European countries, several different organic labelling schemes exist in the market. The aim of this paper is to elicit whether consumers prefer certain organic labelling schemes over others, to give recommendations for market actors in the organic sector. By means of choice experiments and structured interviews with 2441 consumers of organic food in six European countries, consumer preferences and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for different organic logos were analysed. The results of the random parameter logit models showed that the WTP differed considerably between the tested logos. Consumer perceptions of organic labelling schemes turned out to be of subjective nature and in many cases not based on objective knowledge. We conclude that it is advisable to label organic products with well-known organic certification logos that consumers trust. Organisations owning an organic labelling scheme should put effort into measures for increasing consumer awareness of the logo and forming consumer perceptions and attitudes regarding the underlying scheme in terms of standards and control regime. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.