Variables Affecting Consumers' Preference for Healthy Salmon with Health Label

One of the important reasons for the low per capita consumption of fish, especially farmed fish, is the fear of fish being unhealthy due to the use of antibiotics, chemical poisons, chemical drugs and the low health of fish breeding ponds. So, an attention to organic fish production in Iran can lead to an increase in consumption of such an organic product which would become a vital product by consumers. It should be noted that according to the information available in the Iranian Fisheries Organization (IFO), no organic or healthy fish products are currently grown in Iran, and this is an important reason for the low level of farmed fish consumption in the country; in addition, with the establishment of a healthy fish market, besides benefiting the consumer, the producer would also have a kind of competitive advantage, leading to an increase in demand for his healthy product and benefits in this way. Therefore, this study aimed mainly at investigating the willingness of people to pay for healthy farmed salmon, and its innovation was the research on healthy fish while there were used to be conducted the research on consumer behavior in Iran due to the lack of a market for this product.  In this study, the conditional valuation method was used to determine the factors affecting the consumers' willingness to overpay for organic salmon products compared to non-organic ones. This method tries to find out the willingness to pay by preparing a questionnaire and referring to people. Considering that the type of dependent variable in this research was discrete and sequential and had an order in classes and actually showed different levels of consumers' willingness to pay additional fees, to investigate the factors affecting consumers' willingness to pay, the ordinal logit model was used. This type of model is frequently used in survey studies where respondent preferences are categorized as ratings. According to previous similar studies and the research literature, variables such as income, gender, job, marital status, education, awareness of organic products, price or quality preferences, history of consuming organic products, trust in the product health certificate and authorities issuing this certificate and the household’s monthly amount of fish consumption could affect people's willingness to pay for the healthy fish. The statistical population studied in this research included Tehran citizens, and Cochran's formula was used to select the sample size by the information collected through 30 preliminary questionnaires; and finally, the sample size was estimated to be 398 people who were interviewed using the clustered classification method and the desired model was estimated using STATA 17 software. The study results indicated an average willingness to pay by 55 percent., so that the interviewed people were willing to pay 55 percent more than the price of normal fish for the organic/healthy fish. Considering the 30 percent increase in the cost of producing the healthy fish compared to the normal fish, it would also result in good profitability for the producers. The final impact of the age index in the first three groups was positive. This meant that with the increase in age, the probability of people being placed in low groups of willingness to pay would increase; in other words, the credibility of these people's presence in groups with a high willingness to pay would decrease. According to the results, if the person in question was a man, the probability of his placement in the first three groups with the lower willingness to pay would decrease, and the probability of his placement in the three groups with a higher willingness to pay would increase; in addition, the probability of placing married people in the groups with the willingness to pay higher would increase, so that when a person gets married, the probability of being placed in group 4 equals 0.53, group 5 equals 0.31 and group 6 equals 0.92 percent will increase. With the increase of each year to the years of education, the probability of placing a person in the top three groups of willingness to pay would increase and the probability of placing him in the bottom three groups would decrease. The probability of employees being placed in the bottom three groups was less and the probability of them being placed in the top three groups of willingness to pay would increase, compared to people with other jobs. According to the sign of the final impact of the income group variable, it was clear that if a person's income increased by one level, the probability of his placement in the first to third groups of willingness to pay would decrease by 2.4, 1.3 and 0.09 percent, respectively while the probability of his placement in the fourth, fifth and sixth groups would increase by 1.1, 0.6 and 2 percent, respectively. But the individual's awareness variable would also have a positive impact on his willingness to pay, so that with an increase in a person's awareness of healthy and organic products, the probability of his placement in groups 4, 5 and 6 would increase by 1.2, 0.7 and 2 percent, respectively. But if an individual's agreement with the fact that the quality was more important than the price in buying the desired product increased by one level, the probability of his being placed in the first to third groups would decrease by 7.5, 4 and 0.2 percent, respectively as well as while the probability of his presence decreased in groups four to six, it would increase by 3.6, 2.1 and 6.2 percent, respectively. The results of the estimation of the ordinal logit model showed the positive effect of the variables including gender, education, employment, income level, level of awareness, number of consumption times per month and quality orientation index. On the other hand, the lack of trust variable would also have a negative effect on the willingness to pay. The awareness index had also a positive and significant effect on people's willingness to pay; and considering that less than 25 percent of people in the society had proper information about the importance of consumption and production of organic products, this issue would become more necessary and important. This result showed the very high importance of paying attention to the cultivation of organic and healthy products from the production to the consumption stages at the community level. Considering the fact that people who believed that the quality of the product was more important than its price, we can also reach the high importance of consumer education. By promoting the mindset that the quality and health of food products is more important than its price among other members of the society, its demand and as a result, the overall health of the society can also be improved.