Does Food Safety Information Impact U.S. Meat Demand

TLDR: In this article, a theoretical model of consumer response to publicized food safety information on meat demand is developed with an empirical application to U.S. meat consumption, and the authors find that the average response to food safety concerns is small, especially in comparison to price effects, and to previous estimates of health related issues.

Abstract: A theoretical model of consumer response to publicized food safety information on meat demand is developed with an empirical application to U.S. meat consumption. Evidence is found for the existence of pre-committed levels of consumption, seasonal factors, time trends, and contemporaneous own- and cross-commodity food safety concerns. The average demand response to food safety concerns is small, especially in comparison to price effects, and to previous estimates of health related issues. This small average effect masks periods of significantly larger responses corresponding with prominent food safety events, but these larger impacts are short-lived with no apparent food safety lagged effects on Food safety concerns in the United States have dramatically increased in the past decade with regard to incidences of contaminated meat products. Concerns have arisen because contaminated meat products can result in serious risk to the well being and health of consumers. Contamination comes from a myriad of sources, including but not limited to, outbreaks of Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli (E. coli), and Salmonella (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Food safety problems are not isolated to the United States as other unsafe contaminates in meats have emerged across the world, including highly publicized outbreaks of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in Europe. The potential impacts of publicized food safety events on consumer’s demand for meat products in the United States include own-effects on the demand for the contaminated meat involved as well as cross-effects impacting the demand for other meats. The objective of this article is to investigate whether publicized food safety concerns surrounding beef, pork, and poultry (chicken and turkey) have impacted meat consumption. Food safety indices are constructed separately for beef, pork, and poultry