Price premiums for meat products with sustainability labels.

Abstract

With consumers' growing demand for products labeled as having been produced without practices or substances, agricultural producers are given the chance to distinguish their products through eco-labels and other claims. During the last few decades, a number of food labels have been developed to communicate sustainability information, with consumers interested in the carbon footprint and practices of agriculture in recent years. This study investigates the retail premiums for such sustainability labels as greenhouse gas (GHG) emission-reducing practices and other potentially relevant sustainability labels on meat products, including organic, grass-fed, gluten-free, and whether genetically modified organisms were used in production. Prices and labeling information about beef, pork, and chicken products in selected stores from 48 states were collected via web-scraping and investigated for sustainability labels. Market-observed premiums for such labels as reduced-GHG and sustainable practices were investigated alongside impacts of geography on product prices. Our results showed significant premiums for almost all sustainability claims investigated. Among the claims studied, Organic and Grass-fed labels consistently carried positive premiums across all three meat types, with pork products generally exhibiting the highest premiums and chicken products the lowest.