The effects of safety certification and nutrition messaging on the demand for nutritionally enhanced food in urban Ethiopia

Jada, K S and Melesse, M B and Berg, M v d (2022) The effects of safety certification and nutrition messaging on the demand for nutritionally enhanced food in urban Ethiopia. Food Security, 15. pp. 398-409. ISSN 1876-4525

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Abstract

Micronutrient deficiency is among the most significant public health problems in Ethiopia. In this setting, food fortification has been identified as a cost-effective and sustainable strategy to deliver essential micronutrients. Safety certification and nutrition education messages can be used to nudge people to choose fortified foods. However, there is little evidence as to the effectiveness of such interventions in this context. This paper aims to fill this gap. We focus on cooking oil, as it has been identified as an ideal candidate for vitamin A fortification in Ethiopia. To study consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for safety certification and vitamin A fortification, we implemented a stated choice experiment on 996 randomly selected urban consumers to reveal preferences required to calculate WTP. To estimate the causal effect of messages on consumers’ WTP for fortification, a nutrition message on the benefits of vitamin A was provided to 518 randomly selected participants. We found that consumers valued safety certification. This finding holds for certification issued by both government and private parties, with a higher value ascribed to the former. We also found that urban consumers were willing to pay a premium for vitamin A fortification. The nutrition message increased WTP for fortification, albeit only slightly. Finally, we found that the effect of safety certification on consumers’ WTP for fortified cooking oil was higher than its effect on WTP for non-fortified oil, indicating that urban consumers value certification even more when fortification is involved.

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	Research Program : East & Southern Africa
CRP:	UNSPECIFIED
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Fortification, Food safety, Choice experiment, Consumer, Nutrition message
Subjects:	Others > Food and Nutrition
Depositing User:	Mr Nagaraju T
Date Deposited:	05 Jan 2024 04:40
Last Modified:	05 Jan 2024 04:40
URI:	http://oar.icrisat.org/id/eprint/12341
Official URL:	https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12571-0...
Projects:	UNSPECIFIED
Funders:	UNSPECIFIED
Acknowledgement:	We are grateful to the Food Systems for Healthier Diets (FSHD) Flagship of the Agriculture for Nutrition and Health(A4HN) program of the CGIAR for their financial support. We are also deeply grateful to the experiment participants who patiently and willingly responded to our numerous questions. Marrit van den Berg was additionally funded by The Netherlands – CGIAR research programme—Senior Expert Programme, grant number 17226. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Links:	Google Scholar

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