Factors influencing consumer purchase of higher welfare assured pig meat products in Ireland and the UK

Abstract

Several countries have established animal welfare assurance schemes to enable concerned consumers to make informed purchases. This thesis investigates the demand for higher welfare assured pig meat products in Ireland. UK consumers were also included for comparison and as a potential future export market. An extended theory of planned behaviour model and nine pig meat product profiles were used to form an online survey which was distributed to Irish (n = 408) and UK (n = 404) pig meat consumers in October 2022. The aims were to identify what significantly predicted consumers' intention to purchase higher welfare pig meat, estimate the importance and utility of assurance labels, price and product type and to identify consumer segments. The results from UK and Irish consumers were similar and therefore the countries were analysed together. Consumers with high behavioural intention were more likely to have a strong feeling of moral responsibility, think that pig welfare and local production is important, associate higher welfare pig meat with other positive qualities, be influenced by their social circle and were less likely to feel higher welfare products were out of their budget. Conjoint analysis revealed that assurance labels were the most important attribute to consumers, with the pig welfare label having the highest utility. Utility estimates were used to generate three consumer clusters, they were labelled ‘indifferent’ (68%), ‘like labels’ (23%) and ‘pro pig welfare’ (9%). Both the ‘like labels’ and ‘pro pig welfare’ clusters had a higher behavioural intention to purchase higher welfare pig meat products, were more knowledgeable about pig production/welfare and disagreed more that ‘welfare is not a priority’ than the ‘indifferent’ cluster. These findings indicate a potential market for higher welfare products in Ireland and can be used to aid industry stakeholders in effectively developing and marketing future Irish pig meat products.

Date of Award	Jul 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	Teagasc - Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority
Supervisor	Niamh O'Connell (Supervisor), Keelin O'Driscoll (Supervisor) & Sinéad McCarthy (Supervisor)