The Importance of Taste for Food Demand and the Experienced Taste Effect of Healthy Labels – An Experiment on Potato Chips and Bread

Linda Thunstrom and Jonas Nordström

No 2014:13, Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper quantitatively analyzes the importance of taste versus health in food demand, as well as the effect on consumers’ experienced taste of the non-intrinsic value of healthy labels. Our analysis is based on taste experiments and Vickrey second price auctions on potato chips and bread. Our findings imply a large positive effect on demand for potato chips from higher taste scores: when consumers’ experienced taste from potato chips improves by one unit, the average willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a 150 gram bag of chips increases by 25 euro cents. The estimated effect from taste on bread demand is smaller, but may be sizeable for subgroups of consumers. Our evidence suggests that demand for chips and bread is unaffected by nutrition – the effect of the healthy label on WTP is not statistically significant. Finally, we find that consumers’ experienced taste of a food is unaffected by the food carrying a healthy label.

Keywords: willingness-to-pay for food; revealed preferences; taste; non-intrinsic value; healthy label (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D83 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2014-04-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://project.nek.lu.se/publications/workpap/papers/WP14_13.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Importance of Taste for Food Demand and the Experienced Taste Effect of Healthy Labels - An experiment on potato chips and bread (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2014_013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics School of Economics and Management, Box 7080, S-22007 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Iker Arregui Alegria ().