Finnish consumers say they’d be willing to pay up to 10% more for dairy and meat products that come from animals who lived a good life and had high standards of care.
That’s the findings of a new survey in Rural Future newspaper published Monday which also highlighted that animal welfare is a more important issue for women than men.
There were extremes in the findings however – with 8% of respondents saying they would be willing to pay up to 1.5 times the current price for products from animals with high welfare standards; while 25% of people said they didn’t want to pay any more for such products.
The Natural Resources Centre Luke has been carrying out an ongoing project to look at introducing a food label to indicate high standards of animal welfare, which allows consumers to choose this option.
In October an experiment took place in four Helsinki supermarkets to put such a label on milk and minced beef. There was no price difference between the labeled products and other items - so willingness to pay more for these types of products was not tested - but in the future producers could receive more money for having high animal welfare standards.
The survey was carried out by Kantar TNS and involved more than 1,000 people across Finland.
