Empirical analysis of consumer attitudes regarding food safety : an approach by principal components analysis (PCA)

TAMAOKI, Etsuko

With ‘safety’ being recognized as one of the attributes of food quality, this paper explores what key elements the consumers look for to determine that a particular food is safe, and how important those elements are, relative to each other.The employment of Principal Components Analysis to analyze consumer survey responses was a departure from the prevailing ‘deductive’ approaches which rely upon the application of the traditional consumer demand functions to evaluate the economic worth of food safety. The PCA method can compress many variables into reduced numbers of essential factors to highlight patterns in data. This ‘inductive’ approach served the purpose well when definitions of safety are subjective and the levels of safety cannot be measured in numerical values, whereby correlated variables of the consumers’ preferences are lumped together to explain their attitudes.The result of the analysis indicates the Japanese consumers show strong tendencies to pay precise attention to detailed facts on how the food products were produced, being particularly watchful of such information as fertilizer use, irradiation, feed and drugs for animals, GMO ingredients, points of origin of major ingredients, etc. These types of product information of their special concern are characteristic to ‘credence goods’ whose quality cannot be judged even after purchase, and can be often imperfect for consumers. Also, the fact the consumers look for detailed product information to discern food safety may imply a need for more efficiently integrated systems to transfer information from the producers to the market.

Empirical analysis of consumer attitudes regarding food safety : an approach by principal components analysis (PCA)

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