Despite the growing use of country of origin (CoO) information and labels on food, the extent to which consumers really value this information is unclear. In an effort to understand this issue we present results of a hypothetical discrete choice experiment examining consumer willingness-topay for CoO information about meat and meat products. Our results reveal that CoO information is positively valued for all the food products we consider. However, it is relatively less important compared to other food attributes for a large number of products such as bacon, pizza and ready meals. Our results suggest that consumers do not value very highly CoO information for many of the food products examined. Therefore, if the associated costs of mandatory CoO implementation are sufficiently high this raises questions about the inclusion of this information on food labels.

Faced with increasing rates of childhood obesity, the U.K. government has recently introduced stricter regulations to reduce children's exposure to advertising of foods high in fat, sugar, and salt (HFSS). The purpose of our paper is to quantify the impact of HFSS regulations on household expenditures in Devant l'augmentation de l'obésité infantile, le gouvernement du Royaume-Uni a introduit récemment une régulation plus stricte pour diminuer l'exposition des enfants aux publicités d'aliments gras, sucrés et salés (en anglais, produits â HFSS â). L'objectif de notre article est de quantifier l'impact de cette réglementation sur les achats lors de trois phases représentantes de l'évolution de la réglementation

We estimate the implicit prices consumers are willing to pay for country of origin labels, using hedonic price methods and panel data for meat and meat products in the United Kingdom. Our results show that consumers place significant value on origin information across fresh and processed meat products, especially since the horsemeat incident in 2013. The findings also suggest that retailers have increased the use of voluntary labelling of processed meat products since the incident. Hence, further extension of existing mandatory labelling requirements to processed meat products may not be required at least in the short term.

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