I'm preparing a talk at next week's annual meeting of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) on trends in consumer concerns about animal welfare, and I thought while I'm at it I'd share a few of the results here. All the results below come from the Food Demand Survey (FooDS), a monthly survey of over 1,000 consumers that has been ongoing for over four years (each of the graphs below contains information obtained from more than 48,000 survey responses).

One of the first things we ask in the FooDS relates to "food values". A list of 12 items is presented to respondents and they are asked which are most/least important when buying food. Respondents have to click and drag four of the items into a "most important" box and also put four in a "least important" box, leaving four in neither box. The nice thing about this questioning approach is that it requires a tradeoff - respondents can't say all issues are important and they have to indicate some as least important. To create a scale of importance, I simply calculate the percent of times an issue is placed in the most important box and subtract it from the percent of times it is in the least important box, creating a measure that ranges from 100% to -100%.

So, where does animal welfare fall in importance? As the graph shows, it is 7th in the middle of the pack (this graph combines all the data from the last four years). Animal welfare is much less important than taste, safety, nutrition and price but more important than origin, fairness, or novelty. About 18% of consumers place animal welfare in the most important box and 31% place it in the least important box, creating a score of 18%-31%=-14%