Food Agility and Curtin University research is uncovering consumer attitudes towards digital monitoring of animal welfare in pork production and what influences their purchasing decisions.
The research by PhD student Heerah Jose has involved in-depth interviews, which revealed animal welfare is important to consumers, but how highly it’s valued depends on where they’re consuming it.
“Consumers have told me that when they are cooking pork at home, for themselves, friends and family, animal welfare is important and they want information about how that product was produced,” she said.
“But the minute they are outside of home, whether that’s a local restaurant or fine dining, they just want to enjoy the time with their friends and family and are not bothered about animal welfare they don't want to know about it.”
The interviews identified attributes such as animal health, access to food and water, quality of life and humane processing as being important to consumers.
Ms Jose said the research is part of a wider project examining health and welfare outcomes in commercial piggeries through the application of digital technologies.
“We want to understand if digital monitoring of the health and welfare of pigs is of value to consumers and secondly if they’d be prepared to pay for it,” she said.
“The consumers interviewed were skeptical about current animal welfare labels, saying that digital monitoring could provide greater traceability and evidence of high welfare products.”
Research supervisor, Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management and Logistics at the Curtin Faculty of Business and Law, Dr Elizabeth Jackson said the research has been designed to dig deeper into consumer values and motivations for buying higher welfare products.
“We’ve found that while consumers care about animal welfare when buying pork from the supermarket or butcher for at-home consumption, their decision about high welfare products is not made at the point of purchase — their attitudes towards welfare are created long before they step into the supermarket,” Dr Jackson said.
“When we are actually undertaking the behaviour of buying food, we're too busy to be making decisions.”
She said this highlights the need for consumer education, in-home advertising and marketing outside of the supermarket.
The next phase of the study will involve a larger survey of consumers with analysis to inform industry practices and marketing.
The research is part of the Pig welfare and Pork Provenance project, which is using Xsights IoT tags on individual pigs to monitor and respond to animal health issues in commercial piggeries.
The project is a partnership between Food Agility, Curtin University, Craig Mostyn Group, Pork Innovation WA, the Western Australian Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Xsights Digital and Beanstalk AgTech.
ENDS
Media enquiries: Food Agility communications manager Chris Komorek on 0405255905 or chris.komorek@foodagility.com
