What attributes determine consumer preferences for olive oil? A best-worst & latent class approach

Abstract

Through a Best-Worst method and latent class (LC) analysis, the aim of the paper is to measure the importance consumers attached to some attributes when shopping olive oil. The attributes considered were: i) price; ii) geographical origin of production; iii) Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) label; iv) olive variety; v) organic certification; vi) package size; and vii) packaging material. Data come from an online survey conducted in Aragon, a region representative of the Spanish population. The final sample of 402 people was stratified by age, gender, and province. Results show that consumers attached the highest importance to the price, the geographical origin, and the pdo label. On contrary, variety, organic, size, and packaging were the least important attributes. We found five groups of consumers with different perceived importance for olive oil attributes. Three of the groups gave the highest importance to price but differed in the importance attached to the other attributes. A fourth group valued only organic certification and in the fifth group the most valued attributes were quality (PDO), origin and organic certification.