The Influence of The Food Poisoning Scandal on Milk Consumers' Willingness To Pay for Food Safety

Food safety can be said very important problem than any others, because it is closely related to the human activity and health. However, Them milk consumers have come to have some doubts and a great distrust about the food safety in milk owing to the occurrence of the food poisoning scandal by Snow Brand Milk Procudts Co. And the food poisoning scandal had influence on the dairy industries and the milk consumers. It is required to clearly understand the changes in the consumer behavior and their requests for safe milk products. This study aims to identify the influences of the food poisoning scandal on milk consumers and to measure the consumers' Willingness To Pay for the food safety in milk, in case of replacing the main body of current permission system for HACCP with a third party. The analysis were extended to identify the consumers' factors that affect the Willingness To Pay. Data were collected from five regions: Obihiro, Hukui, Sapporo, Osaka, Tokyo, using a structured questionnaire. To sum up the results is as follows. First, aAfter the food poisoning scandal, 68.8 percent of consumers of Snow Brand milk has shifted to the other milk brands. Snow Brand' s milk showed the highest loss ofmarket consumers' ratioshare in Osaka than the other regions. The average amount of Willingness To Pay for food safety is 216.4 yen per litre and Tthe milk consumers in Osaka indicated higher ratio of WTP than the consumers in other areas, when it was classified into two less and over 10 yen in additional payment. Second, the average amount of Willingness To Pay for food safety is 215.2 yen and additional amount of money was from 6.0 yen at the mininum to 28.9 yen at the maximum per litre. Third, tThe result of the regression analysis shows that the income of respondents, the price of milk, a surplus for current milkthe difference between the maximum permissible price of real milk and the real price of the milk, experience in food poisoning and knowledge about HACCP have a significant effect on consumers' Willingness To Pay and the additional WTP for food safety under the inspection system by of a third party