Importance of quality attributes and price for consumer’s decision to use saffron in cookery and as herbal tea

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse the importance of saffron quality attributes and price for consumer’s decision to use saffron in cookery and as herbal tea. The saffron analysed attributes were “aroma”, “taste”, “colour”, “being a natural product of vegetal origin”, “providing health benefits”, “being of a recent harvest”, and “price”. An experiment with 202 consumers was carried out for data collection in Aragon during 2016-2017. The sample was stratified by age, gender, and province of residence. After receiving general information about saffron, respondents were asked to fill in a questionnaire to indicate their choice of the most and the least important attribute from a set of three attributes within seven choice sets, together with their socio-demographic and personality traits. The Best-Worst scaling method was used to assess the attached importance to each saffron attribute. Attribute importance for consumers was assumed heterogeneous and a Random Parameters Logit (RPL) with correlated errors model was estimated. Results indicated that the most important saffron attribute for consumer’s decision to use saffron in cookery and as herbal tea was “providing health benefits”, followed by “taste”, “aroma”, “being of a recent harvest”, “price”, “being a natural product of vegetal origin”, and “colour”