Consumers may consider organic cookies, yogurt and potato chips to be tastier, healthier and lower in calories because they carry an organic label, according to FoodNavigator-USA.com.
The report, citing a researcher at Cornell, Jenny Wan-chen Lee – a graduate student at Cornell University’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management– said many people ‘organic’ to be a positive attribute that can then positively affect their perception of the product’s other characteristics.
To test her theory, Lee conducted a double-blind controlled trial in which 144 participants were asked to evaluate various attributes of what they thought were regular and organic varieties of chocolate sandwich cookies, plain yogurt, and potato chips. In fact, all the products were identical pairs of organic foods.
Lee told FoodNavigator-USA: “There’s this widespread perception that organic is healthier. We wanted to see whether this applied to organic processed foods in particular, and foods [like cookies and potato chips] that people generally don’t associate with either organic or health.”
Participants were asked to rate the foods on a scale of 1 to 9 for various attributes, including overall taste and perception of fat content. In addition, the researchers asked them to estimate the number of calories in each item and to specify how much they would be willing to pay.
They found that participants tended to prefer almost all of the taste attributes for the products labeled ‘organic’, even though they were identical to the products labelled ‘regular’. In terms of healthfulness, participants tended to rate the organic-labelled cookies and chips as more nutritious than their regular-labelled counterparts.
Products labelled organic were also judged to be lower in calories and to warrant higher prices, and were perceived to be higher in fiber and lower in fat.
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