Evaluating consumers' willingness to buy environmentally friendly wines: A store experiment

poster + communication courte confidentielsThe French program Ecophyto 2018 aims at achieving a 50% reduction in pesticide use by 2018. The vine-growing sector being the second largest user of pesticides in France, there is a strong need for French vine-growers to engage in more environmentally sustainable practices. However, they will do so if they are sure that consumers are ready to buy environmentally friendly wines. Thus, the two main objectives of this study were to identify consumers' willingness to buy environmentally friendly wines and to estimate the impact of an information campaign. 220 wine consumers participated in the study. Each consumer came twice, at a 3-week interval, in an experimental store to buy one bottle of wine. Consumers were presented with 11 wines varying according three price levels corresponding to the market price range (4.50, 7.40 and 11.30€) and 4 types of practices (conventional, integrated, organic, biodynamic agriculture). The chosen wine was recorded for each consumer at each session. After the 1st session, consumers were split into two groups: Non-Informed and Informed. The Informed group received at home a brochure containing information about sustainable practices and associated logos. At the end of the 2nd session consumers filled in a questionnaire. Consumers appeared not well informed about the different environmentally sustainable practices for wines, in particular about “biodynamic” wines (74% unknown), and to a lesser extent about integrated production (56% unknown). Nevertheless, consumers are willing to buy environmentally friendly wines if they are sold at the same price than the conventional wines. By comparing the consumers' choices between the two sessions according to be informed or not, we found that the information on wine production methods has a slight effect, but it seems that the information had a negative impact on conventional products rather than a real positive impact on the environmentally friendly products. Acknowledgements This study is part of VINPEST - "An experimental investigation of the willingness to produce environmentally friendly wine", an Integrated Project financed by the Ministry of Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and Energy (MEDDE). This study was also funded by the Regional Council of Burgundy. The authors thank Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation) Labex Europe for the financial support. Lucia H.E.S. Laboissière acknowledges CNPq (Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development)/Labex for her postdoctoral fellowshi