Consumers' perceptions of animal husbandry practices and their heterogeneous needs for information - insights from a cross-country cluster analysis

The growing complexity of value chains leads to an increasing distance between consumers and producers. In anonymized markets, product labels are used to decrease the information asymmetry between producers and consumers, as they replace any form of direct communication. In the context of animal husbandry, we reveal how the distance between consumers and producers is related to consumers' perceptions of animal welfare and elaborate on the role of knowledge, information, and product labels. A quantitative online survey on consumers' perceptions of and attitudes towards animal welfare (AW) was carried out in Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden. Data was analyzed using principal component and cluster analysis, yielding four consumer segments, namely the pragmatists, the AW unconcerned, the indifferent, and the AW concerned. The results indicate that the more contact consumers have with producers/farmers, the higher is consumers' subjective knowledge of animal husbandry systems and the lower is the need for additional information on animal welfare through a label. Further research is needed to investigate the relation between subjective and objective knowledge, animal welfare concern, and consumers' alienation from food production places and practices.