How differentiated are animal-friendly foods and organic foods in the eyes of consumers?

Improving animal welfare is likely to result in higher production costs. As a result, many research studies assessed whether consumers are willing to bear this additional cost. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of providing information about different food attributes (i.e. labelling, information on animal welfare, nutritional information) on consumers’ WTP for animal-friendly food and the degree of competition between this type of food and its organic counterpart. We found that labelling food products and providing consumers with more information on animal welfare can increase their WTP for both animal-friendly and organic food products. We also found that fat content attribute competes with animal-welfare attribute in the case of animal-friendly food and complements the environmental and animal-welfare attributes in the case of organic food. Finally, the results showed that that the information provided to consumers increased the competitive power of organic food with respect to animal-friendly food.