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Abstract
Meat is one the most important products concerning sales in the food retail sector in industrialised
countries. Confirming Eurostat (2007), almost 45% of the agricultural output in the EU 15
comes from meat. However, production figures of some meat products, especially beef, declined
dramatically during the last ten years (minus 690 000 tons between 1995 and 2005 within
the EU 15). 1
Due to several major food scandals in the meat sector (BSE, bird flu, etc.) consumers are actually
quite suspicious towards meat quality and production conditions. Some try to change their
eating behaviour (less meat), others change from one product category to another (from beef to
chicken). As a result, the demand for specific meat products declined during the last decade and
the one with the most dramatic decrease was definitely beef (as a consequence of the BSE-chrisis).
Therefore, producers and supermarket chains tend to use quality labels to suggest reliability
of their meat products. The following study investigates the importance and relevance of several
quality labels. For this purpose we used a routine method of the measurement of consumer perceptions,
the Conjoint Analysis