- First talk is by Laura Witzling and Bret Shaw. They're from the UW-Madison Department of Life Sciences and Communication, and they're gonna talk about Wisconsin local food consumer survey results.  - All good? Alright, thank you very much for coming out today. So, we're gonna be talking today about a consumer survey that we ran last summer, looking at consumer views towards local foods. And I should note to you that this is a snapshot view. We're gonna provide some insights in terms of different parts of the state and that kind of thing. But, you know, our goals here were to look at kind of a large view in terms of consumers views towards local food.  Oh, wait, sorry.  So, this survey was funded by a University of Wisconsin Consortium for Extension and Natural Resources education grant. And part of that is to encourage the Madison campus to work with some of the other campuses. 

So, our partner was David Trechter from UW-River Falls, who's the director of the survey center there. And our goal here is, there's lots of things you can look at with local food, you know. Nutrition, social justice. We were specifically looking at people's willingness to buy more local food, and to pay a premium for that local food. And our goal was to provide actionable insights, actionable recommendations that producers, farmers, and different stakeholders could use to promote local food.  So, to conduct this survey, we first started with a literature view. Not surprisingly, there's been a lot of research done on local foods, to look at what are some of the different issues people have thought about in the past. Then, we worked very closely with the University of Wisconsin-Extension Food Systems Team to get their feedback, you know, what are they hearing in their communities from producers, farmers, that kind of thing. Also, one of our partners on our grant was FairShare, which many of you might know work on CSA's, or Community Supported Agriculture. And then we also ran the survey through a whole variety of different consumers. 

People that weren't as invested in the topic of local foods, to make sure that it made sense to people like an average Wisconsin citizen.  So, on our survey, we received a 25% response rate that included 691 respondents. One of the screening questions on this survey is we wanted the person to be the primary food shopper for their household. In terms of the demographics for this survey, the average, or modal, mean age was 55 to 64, and 59% female, which to some degree makes sense, as we asked for the primary grocery shopper in the house, and that's consistent with some of our research. Primarily white, a pretty good, broad spectrum of people from an ideological standpoint. About 40% conservative, 32% moderate, and 28% liberal. One of the things we wanted to look at is we kind of went in, speculating that maybe local food wasn't so much of a political issue like too many issues are, and we'll be talking more about that, but that turned out to be true that all kinds of people are interested in local foods. The average income was 50,000 to about 75,000, which is consistent with the average income in the state. Also, the average person had more than a high school education, but less than a 4-year college education, which is also the average in the state, so I'm kind of giving you this information to kind of explain to what degree we feel like our data might be representative of the population as a whole. And then a pretty good cross section of people from the city, 31%. 

31%, or 30%, rather, from a small town. 14% of the suburbs, and 20% from rural audiences. So now Laura is gonna share with you some of the data, analysis, and some of the recommendations that we have.  - So, one of the things we were interested in was what people think local food means. So on the survey, we gave people a list of different items, and we said, "Local food has many definitions. "Do these mean local food to you?" And people could choose Yes or No. So, as you can see, 85% of respondents said that Wisconsin means local. It was the choice that had the most agreement. And those different letters you see up there are showing that the choices are different from a statistical point of view. There is also quite a bit of agreement that 50 miles or an hour's drive from where the product was grown and where it was sold means local to people, but when you increase that to 100 miles or a two-hour drive, then only about half of the sample agreed that that meant local food. 

And there was also a lot of agreement that food from other states bordering Wisconsin does not mean local.  We were curious if that would change if we looked at respondents from certain parts of the state, and there are a couple of exceptions. From people that live in Northwestern Wisconsin, it's more like half of them that consider Minnesota to be local, and when you go to Northeast Wisconsin, which is bordering the U.P., about 30% of those people think that Michigan means local. So, a little bit more, but in general, there's pretty much agreement that it's Wisconsin, and those numbers don't change for people that live near Iowa and Illinois.  We asked people about different products, and we said, "On a scale from one, which means never, "to five, which means always, how often "do you buy these items locally?" So, dairy was the thing people responded to most often buying local, and that makes sense, we're in Wisconsin, so people are sensitive to the fact that most of our dairy here is local. Eggs, vegetables and fruit tied for second place, and then beef, packaged goods, chicken and pork were things that people purchased local less frequently.  As Bret said, we were curious about whether people would pay a premium for local food or not, so we gave a question that said, "If a five pound bag of potatoes costs 2 dollars, "and it's labeled U.S.A., what would you pay "for a five pound bag of potatoes labeled as from Wisonsin?" And 30% of the sample wanted to pay the same amount. They said 2 dollars. 6% wanted to pay less, so there are folks that think local food should be less expensive, maybe they think it's traveling less distance, so I shouldn't have to pay as much. But most of the sample, 64%, said that they would pay more for the local potatoes, and the choice they selected most frequently was a dollar more. 

So they're saying they're gonna pay a dollar more for local food. So, you know, I think the takeaway there isn't so much the specific dollar amount, but the fact that most people do think that local food should get a premium.  We asked people, when it comes to buying produce, what attributes of produce are most important to you, and fresh and taste were the two most important ones. These were on a five point scale where a one meant this attribute's not important to me at all, and a five meant it's a great deal of importance to me. After freshness and taste, appearance and it being a convenient place to buy, and a low price were important to people, and you can see that Wisconsin grown came in right at the middle. And Wisconsin grown did come in higher than produce being grown without chemicals, and it came in higher than produce being certified organic. So that's not to say that there aren't specific populations in the state where organic produce isn't important to you, because we know that there are some customers where that's really important, but just as a general snapshot in the state, our findings show that local is more important than organic. And this is consistent with other research. As far as we know, there haven't been too many other large surveys of Wisconsin consumers, but we did find this one from 2001. It's a study from the University of Nebraska, where they looked at consumers in 3 different states, Wisconsin being one of them, and they found that the most important qualities in a food product, not necessarily produce, were taste and quality. 

And if you can kind of imagine quality as sort of a proxy for freshness. And then right in the middle was that the product is locally grown or that the product is state grown, and then toward the bottom is that the product is organic. And there's been other research also, that is showing that there is a trend where people are preferring local to organic.  We also asked people, if you are going to compare local to non-local produce, does it have these attributes? Is it fresher, is it tastier? And what people generally agreed on is that local produce helps local farmers more, it is fresher and it is tastier. And the reason we have fresh and tasty in bold here is because, if you remember from a few slides back, fresh and taste were the two most important things people said that they take into consideration with buying produce in general, so that's really great for local food. There was less agreement about these other attributes, not necessarily that people don't think local produce is these things, but these were just scored lower, that local food supports local jobs, that it's healthier, fairer, contains fewer chemicals, is safer, or reduces pollution more. And what we found is there are some people that think that local food is those things more than non-local food, but just in general in the sample, it's those top three choices that came out pretty consistently high for everyone.  We found that people think that local food is somewhat time consuming to find, it is more expensive than non-local food, and people said that they could somewhat identify local produce at the store compared to non-local produce, so these are all potential challenges for people to buying local. And on this survey when we asked about time consuming, we explained that a little bit. We had parentheses and we said, you know, "Is it more time consuming because "you have to make an extra trip to buy it, "or because you're having to look more "carefully at product labels?"  - Thanks. 

So as important as attitudes were that Laura just described, our survey also asked what do other people, you know, your friends, neighbors, do as it relates to local food, and what do they think about whether you buy local food. And we found that norms were more significant predictor of behavior, self-reported behaviors towards local food, than even attitudes. And it's been long known that other people's behaviors, even when we're not aware of it, has a pretty significant influence on what we actually do.  There's different kinds of norms. Like I said, a subjective norm is this notion of like, "What do my neighbors think about what I do? "What do my friends think about what I do?" And then a descriptive norm is what do people actually do, 'cause we know a lot of times people think we should do something but they don't necessarily do it themselves, and in this case we found strong data that what people are looking at is what people actually do, not what they think you should do. There's been a lot of research on social norms, not so much in the context of local foods, but in different kinds of health behaviors and environmental behaviors. And part of norms being effective is people need to internalize those norms, they need to be positive norms,  and they need to get a sense like, "Hey, this is what a good person does." And you see lots of norms campaigns, where you focus on the community leader, you focus on someone in the neighborhood, or friends, or (mumbles) modeling some type of behavior. And again, there hasn't been-- Oh, I haven't been fast-forwarding this.  So, to give an example, there's been different research done in the context of, for instance, going to a hotel and using your towels again, or getting college students to not think everyone binge drinks. And an example using some of the data from our survey, even though it hasn't been used from local foods, just to give you a feeling of what messaging might look like would be something like, 75% of Wisconsin consumers think local fruits and vegetables are fresher. 

Join your neighbors and buy local today. A different data point from our survey was, 75% of Wisconsin consumers think buying local fruits and vegetables help our local farmers. Join your neighbors to support our local farms. So one of the things that we're gonna be doing moving forward is actually testing different messages and seeing what's more effective, whether it's at a grocery store with signs set up by the produce, using social media, but sort of looking at what makes people click through, what makes people actually purchase more behavior, but our survey data suggests that these are things that influences people's purchasing behaviors, or something for their purchasing behaviors, Laura?  - So, one of the things we were curious about, kind of going off of what Bret was talking about with messaging, was  where people are getting their information about food, and we had a long list of different sources and people could say, "Yes, in the last year "I got information from that source," or, "No, I didn't." And it turns out that signs at grocery stores were something that almost everyone said, "Yeah, I got information about food "from those signs in the last year." Cookbooks and food and cooking websites were also really popular. Right in the middle were non-cookbook books and grocery store staff. Older respondents were more likely to get information from grocery store staff, and sources that were less popular were from the government, from nonprofits, from farmers themselves, either by talking to a farmer in person or by visiting a farm website, going to events about food or using QR codes at the grocery store, and the QR codes were a little bit more popular with younger folks. So, speaking of ages, we wanted to see if we would find different results if we were looking at particular segments of our survey respondents. Because in marketing, if you have one group of respondents that's more similar to each other compared to other groups, you might be able to craft messages that are more resonant with those groups. And it's particularly important if you suspect that those groups might respond differently to messaging otherwise, you could use sort of a one-size-fits-all message. So some of the different groups we looked at were people in different parts of the state, people with different political ideology, people of different ages and income level, and how often people to go to the farmers' market, and where people buy local food, like at the grocery store, CSA, or the farmers' market. 

So, starting with regions of the state, we did find some differences. In Central Wisconsin, people were a little bit less likely to buy community-supported agriculture shares and a little bit less, organic certification was less important to them. And maybe most importantly, they reported that they have a lower weekly food budget than other regions in the state. So, you know, price could be an especially important issue for that region. In Southwest Wisconsin, most of those results came out the same, except that people there reported that local food, local produce in particular, is more tasty than non-local produce, compared to other people, so their produce might be really good in the Southwest. And then in Northwest and Northeast Wisconsin, people were less likely to say that local food is helpful to farmers. It was still something they agreed with, just not as much as the other respondents. In East Central Wisconsin, they said that local food is more time consuming to find, so there could be some accessibility issues there. We did also look at where people buy food, and in East Central Wisconsin, people are more likely to buy food at convenient stores, which also suggests there might be some food access challenges. In South Central Wisconsin, people are more likely to say local food is expensive, so that could be a challenge there. 

And then in Southeast Wisconsin, there were a number of things that came up. People were less aware of local food issues, they bought as much local produce as the rest of the state, but less other local items like meat and cheese. They had less favorable attitudes about local food, but at the same time they have a higher income and higher weekly food budgets, so we know that price is not the issue. And it might have more to do with the fact that there's a lot of suburbs in that part of the state, because when we broke the respondents up by the type of community they live in, rural, suburb, city or small town, which they self selected, we found almost identical results to this with suburbs, so I think rather than thinking something is going on in Southeastern Wisconsin, thinking maybe there's something about living in the suburb, where local food is less popular.  When we looked at respondents by political ideology, we found that we had a really good spectrum among our survey respondents. 30% moderate and liberals, and 40% conservatives. And we found that in terms of buying local, buying community supported agriculture, visiting farmers markets, there weren't any differences, so regardless of political orientation, people are interested in buying local food. We did find that liberals say that they will pay a higher premium, and this is self reported, so we don't actually know that they will pay a higher premium, but at least they say they will, and they also reported seeing more benefits to local food. But when it comes to taste, freshness, and helping farmers, those benefits that, or, those attitudes that we suggested earlier were a little bit more universal. While liberals still come out higher in terms of thinking local food is more beneficial than non-local food on those things, conservatives are still really high on those three, so we're suggesting those as maybe the most universal themes when it comes to marketing local food. 

We didn't find differences in the sample when it comes to income levels, in terms of how much people said they bought local, or how often they visited farmers markets, but we did see that, not surprisingly, people with a higher income were more likely to pay, say they'll pay a premium for local food, and people with lower income reported that price, low price was a more important attribute in terms of buying produce.  And when it comes to age, we also found that regardless of age, people were buying local products other than produce, and that the younger groups, 25 to 44, only buy less local produce if they don't have a child in the house. So once they have a kid in the house, they're buying as much local produce as the other age groups. And the younger groups also reported more willingness to pay a premium for local and reported seeing more benefits to local produce, so they're definitely interested in local food. And we didn't find any differences in terms of going to farmers markets based on age.  Next, we look at a different frequency of going to farmers markets, and we divided people into those that say they often or always go to the farmers' market, they occasionally go, or they infrequently go, and what we found was that among all those groups, demographics were really similar, in terms of age, gender, income, education, but there were more similarities between the people that occasionally and frequently go to farmers markets than those that infrequently go. So the people that are visiting farmers markets are buying more local food, they want to pay more of a premium for it, they see more benefits to local, they're cooking more. And in particular, the people that go frequently buy more local produce, they think other people they know buy more local produce, so that's what Bret was talking about earlier with norms. They see more benefits to local produce in particular, with conservation and fairness compared to the other groups who came out lower on those issues. And one difference that stuck out to us was that they, for them, produce being grown without chemicals was more important, it was a 3.5 out of a five on the scale. 

Whereas people that only occasionally go to the farmers' market that was closer to a three. It's also more important to the farmers' market, the frequent farmers' market shoppers that produce is organic, it's more important to them in a relative sense, but that only came out more like, you know, at a 2.8 out of five. So really, for them, it's about being grown without chemicals and certification isn't as important.  - So, again, to wrap things up, some of the general recommendations that we'd had is, you know, in a straightforward way, the idea is that local food supports local farmers, it's fresh and it's tasty. This transcended ideology, age groups, good messages to use overall. And this idea that overall we don't feel like there's any reason to make local foods a political issue, and it seems to be attractive, sometimes to different people for different reasons, but there's not much controversy per say about the value of local foods. The idea of highlighting social norms is something else to consider. It hasn't been done a lot in local foods marketing to date, but it's something we're gonna be testing, and based on our survey results, looks like it might be one promising approach. Something we're gonna be experimenting next is looking at the labels that you see next to the produce and vegetables. Like, what messages seem to drive greater interest, and even be able to test the idea of what's driving higher levels of purchases, so this is something that we're gonna be looking at in the future. 

And further next steps that we're gonna be doing is we've been soliciting feedback, asking for constructive feedback on, you know, are we presenting these results in actionable ways. We actually have a handout, do we have any left? We'll be sharing some, a briefing with you that sort of summarizes some of these results. But looking for critical feedback to make sure that we're providing this in a way that's useful to you. We're also developing outreach materials which we'll be handing out momentarily. We'll be releasing a full report of these findings which will include all of this and a lot more in March, so stay tuned for that. And in a broad sense, we've also been working with farmers, farmers' market managers to seek out how we can be most effective coming from extension of the university, in helping to promote local foods. So thank you very much for coming out today and with that, we're happy to take any questions you might have and to share the brief that we prepared for you, so thank you.  (applause)