Are They Careful Enough? Testing the Influence of Communication Schemes on Consumers’ Perception of Alternative Processing Methods for Organic Food

Given the increasing public interest in how ingredients are processed and the growing demand for organic food products, it is critical to understand consumers’ expectations about the process-related quality of organic products. In the minds of consumers, organic food is a concept related to either natural or less processed food, which leads them to prefer products obtained with careful processes. The main objective of this paper is to propose a working definition of "careful processing" for organic products and test its consistency while being used in scoring different processing methods by consumers. Results show that the proposed definition allows to consistently rate alternative processing methods. Consumers tend to score novel processing methods such as pulsed electric fields and microwave as less careful, supporting the idea that organic consumers want the least man-made interference with their food products. Results show that a simple but effective definition of careful processing may help consumers to distinguish further organic food products from conventional ones, no matter which communication scheme is used.