Consumers' willingness to pay for organic, clean label, and processed with a new food technology: an application to ready meals

Agri-food companies face the challenge that clean labels and organic are not possible for some processed foods – such as shelf-stable ready meals – with existing processing technologies. This study uses data collected via an online survey and estimates consumers’ willingness to pay for the attributes organic, clean label, and processed with a new food technology in a ready meal. Based on previous literature, one would expect that consumers who prefer a clean label would also prefer a product that is certified organic. However, it was found that consumers who frequently purchase ready meals, prefer a clean label over the organic certification. Results from a latent class analysis identified three classes of consumers within the sample of respondents, the pro-organic and clean label consumer, the pro-clean label and new technology, and the indifferent consumer. The classes of consumers identified in this study, showed heterogeneous preferences towards the organic and clean label attributions, which emphasizes the need to complement the consumer preference assessment with a segmentation analysis. Our findings highlight the importance of technological innovations and the need of presenting consumers with complete information on the new food technologies to mitigate potential neophobias due to unfamiliarity.