The impact of the consumer's environment on the demand for organic products
Résumé
A distinctive feature of the organic market is its strong growth rate. The central question of this paper is whether, in addition to individual determinants, the probability of buying organic products is influenced by the consumer’s environment. A quantitative approach was utilised involving databases: the Homescan dataset Kantar Worldpanel, with both purchasing and socio-demographic data for a panel of 22,359 French households, and national databases describing some components of the consumer's environment: the local sales structure of food retailing, the presence of downstream organic operators and the extent of organic farming. This work relies on a bundle of fourteen products and the methodology used (Heckman method) takes two distinct decision processes into account: the binary decision of whether or not to buy organic products (39% of households did not purchase any organic products), and the budget share that a household allocates to organic food. The ‘all-organic’ basket costs a 62% premium over that of the ‘allconventional’ basket. The average food-budget share for organic products was 3.61% (for all households) and 5.96% (for those that purchase organic). The results show that factors related to the household’s environment (kinds of local sales channel, number of organic operators in the living area and the local role of organic farming) impact on the household’s propensity to purchase organic products. From a practical perspective, our findings point out that to expand organic food consumption, information campaigns on the organic label could benefit from being associated with territorial factors and with the strengthening of contact between (potential) consumers and the local actors of the organic sector.