Organic suspicion cited as reason for slight purchases

Organic suspicion cited as reason for slight purchases

A lack of consumer trust is crippling the Thai organic food market, and the government is not the only one to blame.

Sasin associate professor Krittinee Nuttavuthisit's research on the Thai organic market suggests that consumer trust is perhaps the key component in translating intentions into buying behaviour in credence food markets like organic food.

"A credence good is a product with qualities the consumer can't assess even after buying the product," Assoc Prof Krittinee said. "In the case of organic foods, buyers don't have the tools to independently verify the levels of undesirable chemicals, or the process the food went through."

Consumers are asked to blindly believe they won't be cheated by sellers of organic products, which carry price tags 50% higher than their non-organic counterparts.

But trust in organic products has been damaged by poor enforcement standards, which has made many consumers afraid of buying fake organic products, Assoc Prof Krittinee said.

Last year, a Thai-Pesticide Alert Network (Thai-Pan) random sample found that close to 46% of fruits and vegetables in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Ubon Ratchathani contained more chemicals than the accepted standards. One quarter of the produce sampled was labelled as organic.

Consumer trust comes in two flavours: personal trust and systemic. Personal trust tends to be more important in Eastern societies like Thailand, and this is reflected in the responses of participants in the qualitative part of the study, Assoc Prof Krittinee said.

She said personal trust in the sellers of organic products is very unlikely to constitute the lion's share of trust, since consumers rarely get the chance to meet with producers. System trust, reflected in trust in labels or standards certified by organisations, is the only practical way to build faith in mass produced goods.

The government has been proactive in setting a national organic standard. However, participants in Assoc Prof Krittinee's study said they would "not trust the certification anyway".

The quantitative part of the research also suggested Thai consumers don not know much about organic food. For example, only 9% of respondents were able to recognise the Organic Thailand label without reservations. An additional 9% said they had some idea of what it meant, Assoc Prof Krittinee said.

"Research on Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries' organic food demand is limited, since these countries are not large markets on the consumption side, although they are large in terms of supply," she said.

"However, my preliminary findings indicate that Chinese consumers have a far worse food trust problem, which is driven by the presence of locally produced fake products. Chinese demand for organic products is growing, but this is mostly directed to imported organic products, because consumers find local goods in some categories hard to trust."

While the government has a role in increasing trust, consumers and companies must also be proactive.

Consumer associations can play a central role in building consumer trust by regularly assessing the government's enforcement claims.

Although packaging, design and country of origin can help consumers assess the trustworthiness of a label, evidence produced by independent organisations is also important.

"Customers are the direct stakeholders of companies, and have the ability to demand clearer and stronger standards from them," Assoc Prof Krittinee said.

More companies are doing their own labelling and that is a trend we will probably continue to observe in the coming years. For example, a few companies are producing packages with QR codes that when scanned with a smartphone allow users to observe the product's journey from farm to shelf.

"It is not as simple as saying consumers trust companies more than governments, all bodies have to work on injecting more transparency into the process," said Assoc Prof Krittinee.

She said consumers can reduce their cynicism and suspicions of the market by informing themselves about the products and producers.

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