Conjoint Analysis of Consumer Preferences for Lamb Meat in Central and Southwest Urban Albania

The objective of this study is to inform small ruminant sector stakeholders regarding consumer preferences for lamb meat attributes such as origin, price, weight and safety/certification. Conjoint Choice Experiment (CCE) was utilized to design the survey and latent class approach to analyze the data. Within the prices and weight constraints provided in the survey, origin is an important factor for all four identified consumer classes. All consumer classes prefer domestic lamb meat, and moreover, domestic highland lamb meat is strongly preferred over domestic plain/lowland meat. The identified consumer classes prefer smaller weight lamb to larger ones. This study also analyzed willingness to pay for the main product attributes for the largest consumer groups. The two largest consumer groups were willing to pay 101 and 276 ALL/kg for domestic plain/lowland meat as opposed to imported meat. This result can be used to producers' advantage if labeling and other marketing tools are available to inform consumers of the products' origin. Therefore, enforcement of origin identification should be a priority for the government and other stakeholders, while producers should consider introducing and promoting their own brands such as producer associations' brands.