Do Consumers Pay Attention to the Organic Label When Shopping Organic Food in Italy?

The main objective of organic agriculture is to produce healthy and quality food products without using synthetic chemical products in response to consumers’ concerns about food safety, human health, animal welfare and the environment. The EU’s promotion of organic agriculture constitutes an important alternative for society and for the more marginal agricultural regions in southern Europe. First, organic agriculture provides consumers some products with higher nutritional value that are free of chemical agents. Second, it improves public health, and it brings significant benefits both to the economy as well as to the social cohesion of rural areas. Organic label is a quality signal for the consumers and an important tool to help them to identify organic products. Yiridoe et al. (2005) stated that product labels can help buyers to assess product quality by transforming credence characteristics into search attributes. On 1 July 2010, the European Union introduced a new organic logo in order to increase the transparency and confidence in organic food products for consumers. The difference from the first logo, introduced in the 1990s, is its compulsory basis (EU n. 271/2010 of 24 March 2010) for those products in which at least 95% of the agricultural ingredients are organics. According to the European Union, the application of the new logo and labeling will lead to a much greater visibility of organic foods in the market and increase the trust among European citizens, who will be not only more informed but also more willing to purchase these products (Council Regulation (EC) No. 834/2007 of 28 June 2007). Therefore, understanding the reason why consumers choose to buy organic products and investigating whether they pay attention to organic labeling when shopping are necessary in order to induce new individuals to buy organic food products and to increase the level of consumption among existing consumers. The aim of our chapter is to analyze whether Italian consumers pay attention to organic labeling when shopping, and whether they are also affected by other psychological variables to make purchase decisions. We carried out a study on the intention to purchase organic food products, proposing a model of organic consumption which has been developed on the Theory of Planned Behavior by Ajzen (1991), which extends it with a new variable related to consumers‘ attention to organic label which has not been yet analyzed in Italy. To achieve this goal, a survey was conducted with 380 food shoppers during NovemberDecember 2008 in Italy, and three-equation multivariate probit model is fitted, where