Consumer attitudes towards various labeled food products: The Istanbul case

Over the last decade labeled food products have gain a significance in most of the world markets and Turkey too. Nevertheless, the consumer's reaction and awareness are not fully studied and understood in order to implement the use of labels more effectively either by producers  and companies or by policy makers. Thus, in this work an attempt is made to study consumers' attitudes and awareness for various labeled food products and in particular for organic products, GMO free products, Country-of-Origin (COO) labeled food products in comparison with the conventional - no labels - products. Moreover, consumer's attitudes towards food products and different quality characteristics such as price, taste, quality and food safety are examined. The study took place in urban area of Istanbul, a huge growing market for labeled food products an representative for other urban markets In order to evaluate consumer preferences regarding different labeled food products, employing Logit models were employed and preferences for different products with different criteria are evaluated by Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The AHP analysis demonstrates that  price is the most important variable for conventional  products, quality for organic products, taste for GMO free products, and finally food safety is the most effective variable for COO labeled products. In addition, several inferences were derived which can be used in order to to promote those products and implement food safety strategies.