(P05-015-25) An Innovative Tool for Food Systems Practitioners to Understand What Matters Most to Local Consumers

Objectives: Although food systems projects aim to influence consumers in low- and middle-income countries to purchase healthier and safer food, project implementers rarely invest in understanding what consumers value. We demonstrate application of an easy-to-use consumer preference survey (CPS) in the 2021-26 Feed the Future Livestock and Nutrition (LAN) project that could help implementers with limited time or statistical background to identify factors that influence food purchasing decisions.

Methods: The CPS aimed to understand influential decision factors for purchasing meat—a nutrient-dense food promoted by LAN. Seven factors were included in the CPS based on formative qualitative research: price, freshness, family need, local breed, trusted vendor, hygienic shop, and meat-to-bone ratio. Pre-testing ascertained that within 5 minutes, respondents were able to engage in 7 rounds of prioritization exercise to identify the “most important” and the “least important” factor out of 3 randomly assigned factors per round. Data was collected on beef/mutton consumers by trained local university students over 3 days and analyzed for the total sample (n=204) and sub-groups based on gender (96 male, 108 female) and food system actor (96 farmers, 108 livestock advisors). MaxDiff analysis was used to generate raw preference scores, share of preferences, and probability for a factor to be most important.

Results: "Family need" had a 47% preference share and a 60% probability of being selected as the most important factor for purchasing meat. “Freshness" and “Hygienic shop” had the second- and third-largest preference shares while "meat-to-bone ratio" and "local breed" had the lowest probabilities of being selected as most important (5% and 18%, respectively). Results held consistent for all subgroups, i.e. they remained unchanged regardless of gender and food system actor.

Conclusions: A simple, consumer-centered CPS helped the LAN project team to identify that family need matters most to consumers when purchasing meat. Results and learning from implementing such survey can guide LAN and other nutrition-sensitive food systems projects to develop evidence-based, consumer-oriented social marketing strategies to improve purchase and consumption of nutrient-dense foods.

Funding Sources: U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)