Determinants of Regular and Occasional Consumers' Intentions to Buy Organic Food

This study analyzes the impact of ethical motivations, food safety and health-related concerns on purchasing intentions of habitual and less frequent consumers of organic food. A sample of 291 subjects was surveyed through a paper-and-pencil questionnaire and classified either as “regular” or “occasional” purchasers of organic food according to their buying frequency. Results show different determinants of intention for the two groups of subjects: ethical motivations affect the purchase intentions of regular consumers, whereas food safety concerns influence the purchase intentions of occasional consumers. Implications are discussed. The market for organic food continues to expand worldwide at an average rate of 20% annually. Currently, over thirty-seven million hectares of land worldwide are managed organically by roughly two million farmers. In Europe, more than 250,000 farms manage around ten million hectares of organic land, with the highest share of organic agricultural land found in Spain, Italy and Germany (Willer and Kilcher 2011). In the last decades, this increasing popularity has fueled the growth of a multidisciplinary stream of research that has investigated the psychological and anthropological drivers of organic food consumption. Several studies have concluded that ethical principles, such as ecological sustainability and care for animal welfare—which constitute a sort of “inspirational framework” for organic farming—drive consumers’ choices of organic food. Other studies posit that organic food purchase behavior is motivated by the perceived healthiness of such products (Guido 2009; Guido et al.