John Thøgersen

The MAPP Centre, Aarhus School of Business, Denmark

What predicts consumer choice of organic food?

The obvious main barrier for consumers buying organic food is the supply.   In Northern Europe, there is now quite good supply of organic foods, in some countries even in ordinary supermarkets, while in others people have to go to specialty shops – health food stores – to buy organic foodstuffs.   But in the South of Europe, the supply of organic food is not very good in many places.   But basic supply is the main barrier.

From lack of supply follows some other barriers, such as lack of knowledge of what organic food is really all about, what actually is an organic product, how will I know an organic product when I see one, making it easy for me to choose one.  

We can see from our studies that many consumers actually feel uncertain about organic products and this uncertainty reduces their intention to buy and this translates the intention to buy into actual buying behaviour.   And a cousin of uncertainty is mistrust.

Organic is all about credence, qualities you cannot check - you have to trust the producers and vendors, and if you cannot trust them what is the point in buying it? And if you are uncertain about what it is, how can you trust it?  

Especially because organic products are often more expensive, sometimes substantially more. For a consumer to justify paying extra they need to trust that they are really getting an organic product and they need to [fully ]understand what an organic product is.  

So knowledge is a big barrier, but it’s also very much a derived barrier from supply, because when you look at how people learn about organic, it is pretty much the same as how people learn about other types of food.

Food for most people is not something they are highly involved in.   Some people, of course, will read about it, they have an interest, a motivation, they desire this kind of product or are just curious. Very often learning is experience based – you need to ‘meet’ the product, try them, to taste them, to feel how it is to have them.

During your practical interaction with the product you learn about it.   You can see this clearly, that there is a correlation between people’s experience and how confident they feel about what organic is and how to chose it.

A specific part of knowledge is learning – you may know about the good things organic does for you, but not be able to recognise one when you see it.   You may be able to buy organic food from a Farmers Market from a producer that you trust, but in a supermarket, for example, you need to have information you feel you can trust that tells you what is an organic product.  

The labelling systems we have for organic foods are very important. In the UK you have the Soil Association label, in Denmark, where I come from, there is the Red ‘O’ label. And now there is a European label being introduced in various EU countries.   But before that now, in lots of countries in Europe there has not been any independently controlled label to allow people to chose organic.

If you look at the positive things that make people buy organics, one of the most important is the benefits people expect to derive from organic foods.   Our studies show that many consumers in Europe expect it to be more healthy, more tasty and better for the environment than non-organic food.   These are in fact the three most important benefits that consumers in the 8 European countries that we have studied associate with organic food.

We know that there is still not much evidence backing the health claims.   Organic foods are not sold as being more healthy, what we do know is that there are environmental benefits associated with organic production, but, although there are some studies indicating the health benefits of organics, but the [existing body of ] evidence supporting the health claims is quite weak.   But it is quite common that from the environmental benefits, people derive that because they are free from pesticides and in many ways good for the environment, they must be more healthy.

In many ways, people ‘bond’ with the product.   Organic food products, when you start buying it, produce this involvement in people because they are products which are more expensive and they have a certain ethical quality.   Which means that when people start buying [organic food] it can be associated both with good feelings about doing the right thing and being a responsible person, but also a high status person.   And these things mean that organics food can be quite involving for the person who starts buying it.   From this involvement, you can see developing a positive emotional bond that means that people who have more experience of buying organic food have a more positive feeling towards buying it again, compared to others who haven’t started buying organic, but who may share the same beliefs about health and the environment.

The social dynamics surrounding buying organic are very important.   You can see from our studies that consumers right across Europe are very sensitive to what their peers do in this area.   They are also very sensitive to what they think their peers expect from them. So these perceived social norms have a very important influence on people’s decision to buy or not to buy organic food.

The most important difference between European countries that we have analysed are with regard to bringing ‘intentions’ into behaviour, that is, acting on your decision to buy organic food.   You can see very clearly that in the North of Europe there is a very strong correlation between intentions to buy organic and actually buying organic. While in the South of Europe this correlation is much weaker.   So, we see here that whether or not people act on their intention depends on the wider setting – that is, the maturity of the markets.

If I could remove one barrier to make things happen in the organic market in different countries, it would definitely be the supply barrier.   By this I mean the availability of products, the assortment of products and how it is distributed.   If organic products were distributed as intensively in the normal retail chains as non-organic products, if their availability in the supermarket was as good, if the assortment as deep, then organics would have a much, much higher market share

The most interesting thing in our study is that we have been able to interview a large sample of consumers from 8 different countries in both North and South Europe and analyse them with the same theoretical framework and the same instruments.   This gives a unique insight into differences and similarities between consumers.  

What has struck me as surprising and new is that the reasons why people buy organic and the reasoning behind buying organic are very similar across countries, even in countries as varied as Greece and Germany and as Spain and Denmark.

The accumulated experiences from marketing organic foods in mature markets can be utilised for developing effective marketing campaigns in the less mature markets.   That is the most important insight we have learned so far from this study.

John Thøgersen
PhD, dr.merc, is Professor of Economic Psychology, Aarhus School of Business (ASB), Department of Marketing & Statistics and the MAPP-centre. He is the co-ordinator of the Marketing and Sustainability Research Group and is responsible for the Danish part of the CONDOR project. He has published extensively in the consumption and environment research area including in Journal of Economic Psychology, Journal of Consumer policy Psychology & Marketing, Environment and Behaviour, Journal of Environmental Psychology, International Journal of Research in Marketing and Business Strategy and the Environment. He is Editor-Elect of Journal of Consumer Policy, a peer-reviewed journal published by Springer.