In this paper, we investigated to what extent consumers consider a fairtrade
label when purchasing coffee, using a sample of Belgian consumers.
A substantial number of surveys showed that consumers value the ethical
aspect in a product. However, consumers’ behavior in the marketplace
is apparently not consistent with their reported attitude toward products
with an ethical dimension. In this study, we tried to avoid the misleading
general attitude indications by capturing the hypothetical purchase intention
for fair-trade coffee. In presenting a choice situation to consumers in
a close-to-reality setting, we tried to determine the value of a fair-trade
label, and hence the importance of ethics, by including simultaneously
all the relevant dimensions of coffee-buying intentions. The brand was
the most important attribute of coffee, closely followed by flavor and
fair-trade label in third. The willingness to pay for a fair-trade label on
coffee of the respondents indicated that about 10% of the sample wanted
to pay the current price premium of 27% in Belgium