Assessing consumer acceptance of organic sausage products without curing agents

Summary

This paper presents and comments the results of sales experiments on newly developed organic meat products. The main goal of a research study was to examine the issue of consumer acceptance of organic sausage products with no curing agents. The sales experiment lasted over 12 weeks and was run in six supermarkets offering several variants of organic sausages of which three were produced without curing agents and therefore looked different to the variants produced with nitrite. The results allow an analysis of the consumer acceptance for organic meat products produced with and without curing agents as well as a description of the influence of the introduction of organic sausage variants without nitrite on the share of total sales of organic and conventional sausages. Results show a significant increase in sales of organic sausages and even of total sales of sausages and therefore contradict often heard judgements of German market actors that an additional offer of sausages without curing agents would confuse consumers and would lead to a decrease of organic sales.