Understanding consumer attitudes towards ecolabeled food products: A latent class analysis regarding their purchasing motivations

Ecolabeling is a tool used to promote and support more sustainable products by providing information that enables consumers to select products with better environmental performance. Ecolabels, therefore, can help create social awareness around sustainable consumption and promote respectful attitudes toward the environment, thus generating responsible consumption habits among the consumers. This study aims to analyze the heterogeneity of consumers' motivations in the process of purchasing food products with ecolabels. Additionally, it intends to study consumer typologies regarding their purchasing motivations toward ecolabeled food products to determine possible differences in socioeconomic variables, consumption, and consumer knowledge for these products. To this aim, a total number of 419 questionnaires were collected in Spain during January-February 2019 and a latent class analysis was implemented to segment consumers. The main findings of this study show three types of consumers (indifferent, committed, and skeptical), which present different characteristics, especially regarding their level of knowledge and consumption patterns. [EconLit Citations: M31, O13, Q13, Q56].