Studies on Consumer Demand for Organic Foods – a Survey

Summary

The purpose of this working paper is to give an overview of main results from previous studies on
household demand for organic foods or alternatively for foods certified free-from-pesticideresidues.
We have concentrated on studies handling
• willingness-to-pay (in past as well as future WTP),
• purchasing motives/valued product attributes,
• concern for food safety, especially risk perception regarding pesticides,
• consumers’ stated propensity to buy,
• consumers’ willingness to accept lower quality of organic products,
• the importance of labelling and information,
• the importance of store choice, and
• relations between consumers’ values, risk perception, attitudes and behaviour regarding environmental
protection and WTP.
These issues are handled to a various extent in the reviewed studies. Most of the studies handle
household characteristics. In the paper, we give an overview of the influence from these characteristics.