Will Consumers Pay More For Regenerative-Grown Food?
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
A recent Consumer Insights Report from Purdue University indicates that consumers look favorably upon regenerative agriculture, but don’t really know what it is. Dr. Lourival Monaco is a professor at Purdue University in the Ag Economics Department. He says willingness to pay for regeneratively grown food is not always there with a majority of consumers.
Monaco… “There's a share of the population that is willing to pay for it. When you show them how much that may cost, that support drops dramatically. One of our questions we split the sample in two different groups. One of the groups was just asked, would you be willing to pay more for regen ag? And they said yeah, 50-55 percent-ish said they would. But the other half of the sample, we showed them two pictures of the same bag of chips. One is without a label or without any information around regen ag, and that would be five bucks. And then the other one is $5.50, but it had ' this was produced under regen ag practices' or something along those lines. The ratio flipped. So around 55% are not willing to pay for that anymore, and then 45% are willing to pay. So when you show the costs of that to the end consumer, the support drops quite a bit.”
That’s agricultural economist Lourival Monaco.
