Consumer Motives as Supply Chain Drivers: The Case of Dutch Organic Tomato

The consumer is one of the most important stakeholders in the supply chain (SC), mainly due to the fact that all the other participants involved in the SC should work in fulfilling a customer request. Moreover, the information generated at the consumer level is critical with respect to the design of the SC and as a result strongly related to SC’s performance. Several aspects of consumer behaviour have been studied, especially regarding organic food products, with motivation behind organic food purchases being among the most popular. Key concept, in the vast majority of such studies, is the exploration of a strong foundation for buying organic food, which product attributes are important for the consumers and for what reasons. The current research framework combines two different research approaches – qualitative laddering (N=72) and quantitative survey (N=1453) – to study which consumer motivations are the main drivers in the organic food SC in The Netherlands