Slow Growth Chicken - What do Consumers Think?

What do you think about slow-growth chickens?  If you're like most people I've asked, your answer is probably "what the heck is a slow growth chicken?"  

Food retailers, however, aren't wondering because they're being asked by animal advocacy organizations to make new commitments to only buy chicken from slower-growing birds (here is the request in the EU and here is the Humane Society of the United States on the issue).

First, what is slow growth chicken?  Here's from my new paper on the topic just released by the journal Poultry Science (references omitted):

“Genetic improvements have allowed poultry producers to rear broilers faster and to heavier weights than was possible in previous decades , with the result being more affordable chicken for consumers. However, some research has suggested that rapid growth may result in broilers that suffer from leg damage and pain. These ideas have recently gained traction in popular media and have led to calls for older heritage breeds of chickens, or newer slower growing chickens that are argued to be associated with improved taste and higher broiler welfare. Some research suggests little to no independent relationship between days of growth and consumer sensory evaluations of chicken , and other research suggests that slow-growing breeds are deemed less tender and less juicy than conventional chicken breeds. Nonetheless, consumer preferences for chicken may be as much affected by perceptions and labels than by actual sensory characteristics.”

The new paper reports on the results of some surveys I conducted late last year with about 2,000 U.S. chicken consumers for a project funded by the Food Marketing Institute, the Animal Agriculture Alliance, and the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (a fuller, un-gated report of the results is here).  One of the main results is that most consumers don't know much about slow growth chickens, and as a result, positive or negative information can really sway people one way or the other.  

One group of people were given no extra information.  Another group of people received "pro" slow growth information from articles in NPR (as reported by Dan Charles) and the New York Times (as reported by Stephanie Strom), and yet another group of people received "anti" slow growth information from the National Chicken Council.

After receiving this information, consumers made a number of choices in a simulated retail environment showing packages of chicken breasts with different labels and prices.  These choices were used to back out consumers' willingness-to-pay for the slow-growth label (at present there is no widely adopted slow-growth label, so I created one myself for use in this study).  Here is the distribution of willingness-to-pay ($/lb) for slow growth and organic labels in the different information treatments.

Some of the most interesting results related to the extreme lack of knowledge people have about broiler production in general and slow-grown in particular.  For example, here are some results when they were asked what they thought a variety of different labels implied.  

The table shows the average beliefs about animal welfare, expense, healthfulness, safety, and taste of different labels. Without extra information, slow growth labels tended to be associated with disadvantageous beliefs. Without additional information, slow growth labels are associated with signaling the lowest safety, taste, and health of the labels considered.

Here's how I concluded the article:

“Given the disadvantageous beliefs consumers hold about slow growth claims, a substantial marketing effort would likely be needed for the attribute to become a major determinant of consumer choice. Given consumers’ lack of knowledge about broiler production, simply informing consumers of already existing practices (e.g., cage free and no added hormones) could be a more cost-effective way of boosting chicken demand. That said, it is possible that the presence of hormone absence labels may exacerbate the misinformation problem by indirectly suggesting that there are some brands of chicken that use growth hormones. While organic labels are associated with positive beliefs and are valued relatively highly by consumers, organic production entails significantly higher costs in comparison to non-GMO or no antibiotic claims.

Perhaps the most significant factor explaining the increase in chicken consumption over the past several decades is price. Increases in production efficiencies have reduced chicken prices relative to the price of beef and pork. Perhaps not surprisingly then, this study also shows price to be a major determinant of choice for consumers. Nonetheless, there is a non-trivial minority of consumers who are relatively unconcerned about chicken prices, and these consumers are the target market for the label claims considered in this study.”

Hierarchy, Disagreement, and Food Politics

Discussions about food are frequently divisive.  Low-carb or low-fat?  Organic or conventional?  Local or exotic?  Is our food system fantastic or broken?

Now, look out into the future to the year 2050.  Do you think our future food conversations will be more or less divisive than they are today?  As much as I hope the opposite, I suspect that we're likely to have more disagreement, not less, as we we go forward.  

Here's my theory.  You've no doubt heard of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which characterizes stages of human growth.  The basic idea is that one has to satisfy more basic needs (e.g., food and shelter for survival) before moving on to worry about other "higher" needs, like social belonging.  Other's have posited a similar phenomenon in the domain of food.  For example, see Ellyn Satter in this 2007 academic article where she lays out a hierarchy of food needs.

Below, I've constructed my own version of Satter's food need hierarchy.  At the bottom, when people are highly income and resource constrained, people are asking questions like, "how do I get enough calories to eat?"  Once that question is answered, they can then worry about other things like: "Is this food safe?"  As a person (or country) develops and gains more income, they move from food being primarily consumed to survive to food consumption eventually serving as a form of self expression and actualization.

So, here's my twist on this.  When a community or country is largely at the bottom of the pyramid, there is likely to be broad agreement about "society's" objective in the food and farm realm: produce enough food to eat.  However, at the top of this pyramid, there is no reason to expect "society" to agree on the primary objective.  Satter called the top of this pyramid "instrumental food" and she said such foods were consumed to "achieve a desired physical, cognitive, or spiritual outcome."  If we're talking about food satisfying a particular view of what I think of myself (I eat what I am) or food satisfying a "spiritual outcome", why would we expect you and I to agree on what is "best"?  In this sense, we might expect food consumption to be more politicized.  

Satter also says of such food consumption, "These instrumental reasons may or may not be rational or supported by scientific inquiry."  No kidding!  That's precisely the world in which we now live.  A couple of years ago, for example, the Pew Foundation found that the widest gap between the general public and scientists was on the topic of the safety of GMOs.  Clearly, something other than peer-reviewed science is driving many people's food beliefs and consumption patterns.  

Another challenge is that psychology research shows that we have a tendency to think others are more like us than they actually are.  For those of us who have had the opportunity to "move up" the pyramid, we might forget the more foundational challenges many food consumers' face.  This might be one of the causes of food paternalism I've written about on a number occasions - the view that others should be eating more like me.  This quote from a psychology paper on "egocentric empathy gaps" is particularly apt:

“A traditional Irish proverb, for example, states that ‘the full person does not understand the needs of the hungry.’ Most people in affluent societies may have little appreciation of the desperation of true starvation, and may consequently work less to alleviate it than if they understood how hunger really felt.””

It's not just that we might "work less" but that we might work to solve the problem in ways that suit our own particular desires rather than those we aim to help.  

So, is my little theory correct?  That greater affluence will lead to greater disagreement about which food and food systems are ideal?  As we often say in academic papers when we don't know the answer: "that question is left to future research."  

GMO labels - not as bad as I thought

Science Advances (the open-access version of Science Magazine) just published a paper I co-authored with Jane Kolodinsky from the University of Vermont.  I suspect the paper's findings may raise a few eyebrows, as we find that opposition to GMOs in Vermont fell relative to that in the rest of the U.S. after mandatory labeling was adopted in that state.

Some background context might be useful here.  Several years go, I was decidedly in the camp that thought imposition of mandatory labels would cause people to be more concerned about GMOs because it would signal that something was unsafe about the technology.  Prominent scholars such as Cass Sunstein have argued the same.  A few years ago, Marco Costanigro and I put this hypothesis to the test in a paper published by Food Policy, and we found little evidence (in a series of survey-based experiments) that the label per se neither increased or decreased aversion to GMOs.  So, I was less convinced that this particular argument against mandatory GMO labeling was valid, but I was still unsure.  

Then, last summer at the annual meetings of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), I saw Jane present a paper based on survey data she collected in Vermont before and after mandatory labels went into place there.  Her data suggested opposition to GMOs fell at faster rate after mandatory labels were in place.  Despite my findings in Food Policy, I remained dubious and Jane and I went back and forth a bit on the robustness of her findings. 

I'd been in enough conversations with Jane to know that we had different philosophical leanings about the desirability of GMOs, but this was an empirical question, so we put our differences aside and decided to join our data and put the hypothesis to the test.  Through the Food Demand Survey (FooDS), I had been collecting nationwide data on consumer's concerns about GMOs, and I suggested we combine our two sets of data and do a true "difference-in-difference" test: Did the difference in concern among consumers in VT and the result of the US increase or decrease after mandatory labeling was adopted in VT?

Our article in Science Advances has the result:

“This research aims to help resolve this issue using a data set containing more than 7800 observations that measures levels of opposition in a national control group compared to levels in Vermont, the only U.S. state to have implemented mandatory labeling of GE foods. Difference-in-difference estimates of opposition to GE food before and after mandatory labeling show that the labeling policy led to a 19% reduction in opposition to GE food. The findings help provide insights into the psychology of consumers’ risk perceptions that can be used in communicating the benefits and risks of genetic engineering technology to the public.”

One important caveat should be mentioned here.  Our result does NOT suggest people will suddenly support GMOs once mandatory labels are in place.  Rather, our findings suggest that people will be somewhat less opposed than they were prior to labels.  I mention this because in the wake of my paper with Marco in Food Policy some of the media's interpretation of our results (such as that of the New York Times editorial board), could have been construed as suggesting that imposition of mandatory labels would not cause economic harm.  That may or may not be true.  But, this new study suggest that labels per se may in fact reduce opposition.

It was great to work with Jane on this project, and for me it was a good lesson to test your beliefs, particularly when there are theoretical reasons that could support the opposing point of view.

I'll end with a key graph from the paper.

Future Food Demand

Will we be able to produce enough food to feed a more populated and likely richer world in 2050?  The answer to this question depends not just on what technologies we develop but also on what people in different parts of the world will want to eat in 2050.  A new paper by Christophe Gouel and Houssein Guimbard in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics takes data from consumption of 7 categories of food in over 100 different countries to explore how food demand changes with income and population, and then they use these estimates to project future food demand given estimates of income and population growth.  

First, they show that as incomes rise, demand for oils and fats and for animal-based food increases. 

The following graph (from their appendix) shows the projected changes in global demand for different types of food on out to 2100.

Here is a summary of their findings:

“The main results of our projections to 2050 are that (a) food demand will increase by 47%, representing less than half of the growth experienced in the four decades before 2010; (b) this growth will come mainly from developing countries because in high-income countries, food demand is already at high per capita levels and population growth will be low; (c) growth in starchy staples will be small at 19%, supported by population increases because per capita consumption is predicted to decrease while demand for animal-based food will double, thereby increasing the global share of animal-based calories from 17% in 2010 to 23% in 2050; and (d) these projections present large uncertainties that are neglected in related studies: under alternative plausible futures for GDP and population, demand for animal-based calories increases between 74% and 114%.”

Food Demand Survey (FooDS) Finale - at least for now

Five years ago in May 2013, I put out the first issue of the Food Demand Survey (FooDS).  Every month since that time, a survey of over 1,000 food consumers (a different 1,000 each month), has been conducted where we've tracked concerns, attitudes, and preferences for various food issues over time.  This has been a really fun project.  Alas, all good things must come to an end and the May 2018 edition of FooDS will be the last - at least in its current incarnation.  

Here I wanted to highlight some of the findings we've generated and provide some graphs showing the trends we've observed over the past five years (every issue of FooDS and all the underlying data is available here).  At the end, I'll give a few "thanks" and give insights on where the project may be heading next.  

Some highlights.

• The survey result that easily generated the most attention over the past five years was the finding that over 80% of consumers said they wanted mandatory labeling of foods that contain DNA (we've subsequently asked this question at least a half dozen times in different ways and have consistently found similar results).
• About two thirds of consumers say that a food with "added salt" would be considered natural, but only about one-third say the same of a food with "added sodium chloride."
• During the past farm bill debate, we found that consumers supported a number of reforms to the SNAP (aka "food stamp") program but also opposed significant monetary cuts.
• The results were used to show how meat demand varies across different states in the U.S.
• How do vegetarians and vegans differ from meat eaters?
• We explored the "food values" of Millennials and looked at how food values varied for the rich and poor.  
• Who do people trust for information about food?
• How does spending on food vary with income?
• I haven't kept good track of it, but I'd guess we've published at least a dozen academic journal articles that have used FooDS data in one way or another, including my AAEA presidential address in the AJAE, a paper with Glynn Tonsor on meat demand in AEPP, a Food Policy paper with Brandon McFadden and Norbert Wilson on GMOs, a paper on food waste with Brenna Ellison in AEPP, a paper with Brad Rickard and Brandon McFadden in the Biotechnology Journal, a paper in AEPP on GMO labels with Brandon, papers in Ecological Economics and the European Review of Agricultural Economics with Trey Malone on inattention in surveys, another paper with Trey on impact of taste, health, and safety beliefs on meat demand in JAAE, and the data is also mentioned in papers on effect of new egg laws on egg prices in a paper with Trey Malone in JARE and another one with Connor Mullally in AJAE. Marc Bellemare even used some results from FooDS in his recent AJAE paper with Jenny Nguyen on farmers markets and food safety.

Now for some trends (note: each of the graphs below shows data from at least 1,000 consumers surveyed each month for 5 years for a total of more than 60,000 observations).  Because I've discussed these results many times in the past, I'm going to let these graphs "stand on their own" without interpretation or description of how the data are collected or analyzed.

note: "average" is the average of about 16 other issues tracked in the survey

note: "average" is the average of about 16 other issues tracked in the survey

Food Values over Time

Finally, I want to say thanks to Susan Murray who did the heavy lifting every month, Bailey Norwood who helped me conceptualize the project and kept it running for the last year, Glynn Tonsor who provided intellectual capital over the course of the project, and many graduate students who provided great ideas and analysis.  Early on, funding support for the project came from the Willard Sparks Endowed Chair.  Later, the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State pitched in.  For the past several years, funding support came from a USDA-AFRI-NIFA grant.  I've had numerous conversations with Bailey (at Oklahoma State), Glynn (at Kansas State), and Trey (at Michigan State) about the future of the project, where it might "reside", and how it should change to be even more informative.  All the details are yet to be worked out, but I think there is a good chance FooDS will re-emerge in the next several months with a new "home" and focus.