Evaluation of preferences of consumers towards extra-virgin olive oil - A multiperspective approach

Olive oil is one of the leading products for Southern Europe economy and it is an important products for consumers as well: in fact, it has an important role in determining the healthiness of diets. In light of those elements it is important to explain what is valued by consumers in order to focus the development of the product toward what the consumer appreciates. In this work what we underlined is the importance of quality in the different dimensions as determined by the consumer. The work investigates the issue in different perspectives and dimensions. At first a meta-analysis shows the state of the art of the literature. Furthermore the complete view is achieved with a further elaboration of the existent data. Then it follows with a study based upon a hedonic price model applied to extra-virgin olive oil considering also sensory attributes as determined by a trained panel to allow for some policy considerations. Subsequently, a further hedonic price model has been applied to a big dataset of retail scanner data to analyze the implicit price of attributes of products weighted by sales values. In the end, another paper analyzes how visual elements of the packaging can influence healthiness perception in the case of two products: olive oil and butter combined with olive oil. Here it has been possible to shift the focus on the subjective perspective of the consumer, considering more deeply the influence of the environment and the personal traits in the evaluation of products. Those studies allowed to have a complete understanding about the preferences of consumers, in terms of attributes of the products and of salient elements of the packaging. Furthermore, a discrepancy is found about how the consumers conceive extra-virgin olive oil quality compared to what is desired by European policy. To solve this conflict some efforts aimed at educating the consumers are needed.