Consumer Willingness to Pay for Safe Vegetable Ingredient Certification and Nutrition Labels on Menu in Restaurants

Abstract

Restaurants have a significant role in consumers’ access to safe and healthy food. Food safety certification, as well as nutrition and ingredient information disclosure can reduce imperfect and asymmetric information between them and their customers. This study is intended to measure consumers’ willingness to pay for safe vegetable ingredient certification and nutrition labeling on the menu, and assess the benefit of certified vegetable ingredient.  Based on choice experiment method, salad is used to elicit preferences from 300 consumers in Bangkok. The results show that the consumers have the highest willingness to pay for certified organic vegetable ingredient, followed by certifications of hygiene standards and pesticide residue free vegetable ingredients, respectively. However they give less value to nutrition labels on menu. Regarding the benefit-cost ratios, if restaurants want to improve the quality of vegetable ingredients, they should start with using certified pesticide residue free vegetable ingredients. Our results suggest that restaurants should have certification of vegetable ingredients, including hygiene standard. In addition, at the policy level, the National Bureau of Agricultural Commodity and Food Standards and Department of Health should cooperate in food safety implementations such as establishing a common standard and procedure of granting food safety certification to facilitate new applicants.