Importance and Relevance of Quality Labels in the Austrian Meat Supply Chain

Meat is one the most important products concerning sales in the food retail sector in industrialised countries. Confirming Eurostat (2007), almost 45% of the agricultural output in the EU 15 comes from meat. However, production figures of some meat products, especially beef, declined dramatically during the last ten years (minus 690 000 tons between 1995 and 2005 within the EU 15). 1 Due to several major food scandals in the meat sector (BSE, bird flu, etc.) consumers are actually quite suspicious towards meat quality and production conditions. Some try to change their eating behaviour (less meat), others change from one product category to another (from beef to chicken). As a result, the demand for specific meat products declined during the last decade and the one with the most dramatic decrease was definitely beef (as a consequence of the BSE-chrisis). Therefore, producers and supermarket chains tend to use quality labels to suggest reliability of their meat products. The following study investigates the importance and relevance of several quality labels. For this purpose we used a routine method of the measurement of consumer perceptions, the Conjoint Analysis