Consumers' valuation of two packaging aspects for fresh lamb meat: Vacuum and information labels

The use of vacuum packaging for fresh meat with low rate of turnover in the supermarket shelves, as it is the case of lamb meat in Spain, is recommended. Because the amount of mandatory information on fresh‐meat labels has increased, there is a need to design new labels to enhance the support for this information. Therefore, to anticipate the consumer's acceptance of vacuum packaging and the preferences for newly designed labels is of vital importance. This is the objective of the paper; in particular, it measures the consumers' relative importance of the vacuum packaging and different labels in relation to other important lamb‐meat characteristics (type of cut, price, and regional indication). To do that, a choice experiment was used and an error‐component random‐parameter model with correlated errors was estimated. Results suggest that consumers positively value all of the attributes except for the new designed labels. In particular, consumers positively value the vacuum packaging but to lesser extent than other lamb‐meat attributes such as the type of cut, the protected geographical indication certification, and the price. However, consumers only value the vacuum packaging in the case of fresh lamb meat with a protected geographical indication certification. Moreover, this valuation is higher for older consumers who use, to a higher extent, their own direct appraisal of the meat and the information on the label when shopping and give less importance to the presence of liquid around the meat.