Willingness to pay for safety label on sugar and vegetable oil among households in South – Western Nigeria

Abstract

This study investigates willingness to pay for safety label on sugar and vegetable oil among households in South – Western Nigeria. In all, 390 consumers comprising 180 from Oyo and 210 from Lagos were sampled. Data collected include socio-economic, market and food safety information variables using structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and logit regression model were used for data analysis. Most (61.6% and 70.0%) of sugar and vegetable oil consumers are in their active age bracket of 16 and 45 years. Gender wise 55.6% and 56.3% of female consumed sugar and vegetable oil, while the corresponding values for male are 44.4% and 43.7% respectively. Consumer distribution by monthly income showed that 34.4% of sugar consumers earned an average income of N48,500 (±8,445) while 32.5% of vegetable oil consumers earned an average income greater than N95,500 (±10,500). Majority of sugar (52.2%), vegetable oil (51.1%) consumers had primary and tertiary education respectively. The mean household size for sugar and vegetable oil consumers are 4 (±2) and 6 (±3) respectively. Fewer (33.3%) of consumers of sugar and (43.8%) of vegetable oil consumers are aware of food safety information. Consumers have higher (66.3%) level of awareness of Vitamin A in vegetable oil compared to sugar (21.1%). The consumer’s mean WTP for food safety information was N36.41k/kg for sugar and N15.98/litre of vegetable oil. This represented a market premium of 91.3% and 53.3% of the maximum bid for food safety in both sugar and vegetable oil. While increased in age (â = -0.11) reduced WTP for safety information in sugar, higher level of education increased WTP (â 0.4569) at P < 0.01. In the case of vegetable oil being a woman (â = 0.9521), having high income (â = 0.9956) and purchasing from registered shop (â = 0.9452) increased WTP at P < 0.05. Consumers are willing to pay more for food safety information on sugar compared with vegetable oil. However, consumers willingness to pay (WTP) for safety label increased with buying from registered shop and having high income.