The Food Demand Survey (FooDS) has now been ongoing for a full year!
We've pulled together summary statistics on the key variables we've tracked over time.
For example, here is an index of awareness (how much people have heard or read about an issue in the preceding two weeks) and concern over the past year, for the four issues that seem to top the lists each month (in total, we track 17 items).
Awareness is much more variable over time than is concern.
The spike in awareness for Salmonella in October, 2013 corresponds with a widely publicized Salmonella outbreak from a California poultry processor (Foster Farms).
It interesting to compare the Salmonella spike in awareness with external data sources. I searched the term "Foster farms" (shown in blue below) and "Salmonella" (shown in red below) in Google trends over the past year. Google trends, according to Wikipedia, "shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume." The volume of searches measured by Google, both the October spike and the smaller rise in January and February, match up quite will with our measure of awareness shown in figure 2 above.
Of course, the thing we have that Google analytic doesn't, is information on concern for issues on on willingness-to-pay for chicken and other meat products.
Curiously, despite the spike in awareness of Salmonella in October, we did not observe big changes in concern for Salmonella or huge changes consumer willingness-to-pay or plans to buy chicken.
Of course, our survey is more than just about this single incident or issue, but the preceding discussion is an example of the kinds of insights we hoped FooDS would deliver.
Read the whole summary here.