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Meat production systems have to become more sustainable to ensure their social license to operate. While the discussion on the meat sector’s social license to operate revolves around sustainability and ethicality of meat production, less is known about consumers’ ethical orientation in relation to meat consumption. To this end, we incorporate a measurement scale for consumers’ ethical orientation in a latent class choice segmentation with 3028 European consumers to understand their preferences regarding responsible meat production and the role of ethicality as well as environmental concern. The results show that the segment with high meat consumption prefers lower prices and a smaller share of less-price sensitive, environmentally concerned consumers prefer the meat of animals that had outdoor access. A higher ethical orientation is associated with purchasing welfare meat. We conclude that ethicality appeals could have potential in reaching consumers of welfare meat.

Removed at the request of the first author.

Presentation removed November 1, 2016 at author's request.

To guide consumers in their decision process, especially food products often carry labels indicating production method or nutritional content. However, past research shows that many labels are rarely attended to in the consumer's decision process. In order to enhance the effectiveness of such labels and to increase choice likelihood of labeled products, the label must capture attention. We address the question of how a single label on the product packaging can capture attention through bottom-up effects and increase choice through increased attention capture. To this end, we conducted a combined eye tracking and choice experiment manipulating the surface size and visual saliency – the two most important bottom-up effects on attention – of the Danish organic label across three food product categories. Results show a strong and significant increase in attention capture towards a larger and more visually salient label. Most importantly, the effect of attention capture carried over into increased choice likelihood. Both marketers and policy makers might benefit from this approach, which provides directions for designing product labels that can influence attention capture and product choice. Refereed/Peer-reviewed