Chinese Consumers' Demand for Food Safety Attributes: A Push for Government and Industry Regulations

The diet of urban Chinese consumers has changed drastically over the past twenty years, due in part to rising incomes and changing lifestyles. Food consumption has shifted away from grains and toward higher-quality calories from animal proteins and aquaculture products. Dairy demand in urban China has shown remarkable growth in the past decade, driven by mutually reinforcing factors, including rising incomes, government promotion of dairy products, changing urban lifestyles, and the development of more sophisticated marketing channels (Fuller et al. 2006). China’s dairy production has surged from just over 10 million metric tons in 2001 to an expected production level of nearly 48 million metric tons by 2013 (Woolsey, Zhang, and Zhang 2010). Most notable has been the rise in demand for ultra-high temperature (UHT) pasteurized fluid milk among urban consumers in recent years, with a 50% sales increase in 2009 alone (Fuller et al. 2006; Wang, Mao, and Gale 2008; Woolsey, Zhang, and Zhang 2010).