Consumer awareness of sustainable supply chains: A choice experiment on Parma ham PDO.

The food system produces emissions at all stages, from agriculture and its inputs, and the livestock sector is nowadays one of the most significant contributors to environmental problems. The European swine production system is mainly intensive and generates high external costs such as water and air pollution. As a response to these emerging issues, there is a growing interest in the relationships between marketing and sustainability, with people that have begun to pay much more attention to health, environmental friendliness, and quality of products. The aim of this study is to understand if there is a market for a high-quality "Parma ham PDO", produced in sustainable supply chain at an environmental, health and animal welfare level. In this paper, we use discrete choice experiments to investigate Italian consumer's preferences and their willingness to pay (WTP) for Parma ham PDO with different characteristics, amongst which the use of air scrubber technology reducing pollutants emissions. Results seem to encourage the pork industry in better exploring pollutant emissions' reduction, showing a consumers' willingness to pay for this production technology. Similarly, results of this study can suggest the existence of a niche market for this typology of production.

Eating edible insects as sustainable food? Exploring the determinants of consumer acceptance in Germany.

The potential use of insects as a novel food source has recently attracted a great deal of attention in Europe, as they have many environmental and nutritional advantages and thus present a promising and sustainable animal protein source. Yet despite insects being a highly appreciated food in many parts of the world, consumer aversion remains as the major barrier to successful implementation in Europe. This study examines prospects of edible whole insect and processed insect-based food in Germany and investigates determining factors for acceptance. It does so to better understand consumers' attitudes toward insects and to derive approaches for insect food to become more appreciated. An online survey was conducted within the German population with a final sample of 393 participants. Several explanatory variables were established, and their influence on the acceptance of whole and processed insect products was analyzed by applying ordinal regressions to compare the market potential and hurdles of either option. The main results show a low willingness to try insects among Germans and the prevalence of psychological and personality barriers to consumption, such as disgust and food neophobia. Focusing on processed insect products is shown to be the most promising strategy to implement entomophagy, as an essential barrier to consumption is the visibility of the insects. However, whether this strategy would diminish the rejection of any insect product requires further investigation.

Environmental impact of strawberry production in Italy and Switzerland with different cultivation practices.

In this study, the environmental impact of strawberry production in Italy and Switzerland was evaluated using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach. The main differences between the two countries are the cultivation practices: crop cycle duration (1 year in Switzerland and 2 or 3 years in Italy), soil management and cultivation in open and protected fields. For all the environmental impact categories evaluated with LCA, strawberry production in Switzerland shows higher impacts respect to the Italian production. The impact reduction related to the Italian production in open fields without soil sterilisation ranges from 96% (for photochemical oxidant formation) to 35% (for freshwater eutrophication). For Swiss production, soil sterilisation is by far the main environmental hotspot for all the evaluated environmental effects except for toxicity-related impact categories and for resources consumption (i.e. manufacturing, maintenance and disposal of tunnel). Conversely, the main hotspot in Italy differs depending on the considered categories. Moreover, the 3-years cycle duration has a higher impact respect to the 2-years one because of the low yield in the third year that worsens the outcomes. Finally, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis were performed. The environmental results are deeply affected by yield variation and only slightly by changes in the life span of the tunnels while the uncertainty related to the selection of the data source, the model imprecision, and the variability of data does not affect significantly the results, except for the toxicity-related impact categories.