Food labels: how consumers value moral, environmental, and health aspects of meat consumption

Abstract

Policy changes could improve health and environmental outcomes by addressing the many externalities and internalities related to food consumption. Using a stated preference approach, we investigate to what extent consumers are willing to make costlier food consumption choices if doing so contributes to decrease environmental externalities, health damages, and animal suffering. We find a considerable willingness to pay for some aspects of the food bought. People are willing to pay an additional 50% for a product if it carries a label declaring that the product meets the highest available standards in terms of healthiness, animal welfare, and antibiotics use, respectively. The willingness to pay for a climate impact label is also sizeable but smaller. We compare a traffic-light label with a plain-text label and a grey-scale label in order to disentangle the effects of introducing labels Our results are mixed, suggesting that a traffic-light label has both normative and cognitive effects on behavior.