European Consumers’ Acceptance of Beef Safety-Improving Interventions at Different Stages of the Beef Chain: Primary Production, Slaughtering, Processing and Packaging

Abstract

Following the occurrence of meat safety incidents during the nineties (Verbeke et al., 1999), considerable effort has been done to improve safety in the beef chain, both by policy and beef chain actors. Nowadays, a wide array of interventions to improve beef safety is applied at different stages through the beef chain. As a result the microbiological safety risk has been significantly reduced (Koohmaraie et al., 2005). Although the benefits for the sector and the end users seem to be rather obvious, the application of interventions and technologies that are used to enhance beef safety is not always communicated to consumers. Currently, communication related to technologies and processes used in beef production and processing from the sector to consumers is often driven by legal obligations (for instance traceability) or profit seeking (for instance organic labelling). Consequently, information asymmetry between producers and consumers is the rule rather than the exception....