Market differentiation potential of traditional food quality labels: consumer and producer expectation

In the last few decades more consumers are choosing food products based on their local and traditional attributes as well as environmental and sustainability issues. The food industry have introduced several strategies to guarantee product quality and sustainability (quality schemes and quality labelling). With their rising number it is hard for consumers to differentiate between them. The purpose of the paper is to investigate how consumers perceive traditional food quality labels and to confront consumer expectations with the producer’s motivation to supply certificated traditional products. The analysis has been based on literature studies and empirical data ob-tained from qualitative research in 2020. Six focus groups were conducted, with 7-8 participants in each, among traditional food producers and consumers in Poland. As the results of this study show, the awareness of food quality labels in Poland is quite low. The study concluded that apart from providing producers with protection from food fraud and serving as a indicator of a given quality, the additional differentiation of traditional food quality labeling is clearly not obvious. Results add value to recent consumers’ behavior knowledge by analyz-ing role of food quality labels in consumer decision-making and the possible mo-tives for producers that choose to feature them. These findings may be useful in developing effective educational and marketing activities in the traditional food sector.