Purpose: This is an exploratory study on consumer information and behaviour towards green, health, local, social and environmental credentials on labels. It focusses on many dimensions of sustainability in the food products that affect consumer choices with a dual purpose: to identify and define “sustainable consumption” behaviour in broad sense and to investigate empirically the factors affecting the real consumption behaviours. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on consumers’ understanding, motivation and use of sustainable labelling in order to understand the role sustainability information plays in the food products market.Design/methodology/approach: Two focus groups in order to investigate consumer motivation and behaviour in-depth and to prepare the questionnaire. Identification of the outcomes that could summarize sustainable consumption combining: purchase of local products, consume only seasonal fruit, prefer products with recyclable packaging, attention to the fat content in foods, give importance to traceability and purchase products only in the place of origin. Identification of the “at risk” virtuous consumer, using a binary logistic regression approach, taking into account demographic characteristics, the food and nutrition value system, experience, knowledge, institutional factors and marketing.Findings: Results from the focus groups are mainly in line with the empirical analysis, highlighting the key role of education in influencing consumer attitude and behaviour. Consumers give little attention to information provided on the label for sustainable food consumption and environmental protection and have little knowledge of environmental problems. The virtuous consumer appears to give importance to a better food nutrition value system, to pay more attention to ingredients and instructions on the label, to be more attentive to environmental and sustainable attributes, to be concerned about product quality and to be slightly influenced by brands and special offers.Research limitations/implications: The findings from the empirical analysis confirm the results from focus groups even if it was not possible from the empirical analysis to investigate in-depth the marketing aspects concerning the food choice. This limit probably comes from the low number of observations. Further research will focus on these marketing aspects.Practical implications: Products with sustainable attributes can become a strategic variable and allow companies to gain a competitive advantage, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises. This may encourage the development of new marketing channels based on the direct relationship between producer and the new consumer demand, increasingly sensitive to the food security issues.Social implications: There is a potential interest and sensitiveness to having sustainable behaviour in a broad sense, but there is a lack of knowledge about how to behave to be sustainable. In the absence of binding rules, it is necessary that government promote information and campaigns to generate greater awareness on sustainability, aiming at increasing knowledge to drive the consumer’s choices. This may lead to virtuous results in terms of reducing social costs related to an unhealthy diet, food waste and unsustainable consumption.Originality/value: The results show that despite the appearance of attention to the environment and to healthy food which is associated with this emerging critical consumer in the literature, there remains the problem of the consumer giving little attention to information provided on the label for sustainable food consumption and environmental protection. This is the problem of “rules of thumb” in purchasing decisions that prevail in the following situations: when consumers have an overload of information that exceeds their processing limits; when they tend to base their decision making on heuristics, focussing their choices on brands as a proxy for high-quality, product-related characteristics.

The purpose of the research is to evaluate the impact of different kinds of information disclosures of milk labels, investigating the interest among consumers based on their consumption behaviours and characteristics. In this research, all the actions which lead to a healthiness, become expressions of a production process, among which consumers’ food choices, purchase, preparation, and also self-production. Therefore, in the “health creation” production process, information and knowledge about food become “investments”. In this context, label disclosures become a tangible expression of this kind of “investment”. The research question is: what impact do purchase preferences and consumers’ characteristics have on their interest towards the label information provided? Several information disclosures, both mandatory and voluntary, are investigated. Therefore, some choice attributes will be analysed as indicators of the consumer’s behaviour in relation to his investment in food information. The methodology used for the analysis is an Ordered Logit. The analysis of the consumer’s behaviour has been performed by transposing Ménard’s analysis of firm corporate governance (Ménard, Agribus. 34:142–160, 2018) to the consumer as producer of welfare equity. The reduction of information asymmetry is a cost for the producer, and this research may be able to measure how much it would be convenient to invest in this reduction, based on the analysis of the consumer’s behaviour toward his personal investment in food information acquisition.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the structural characteristics, the governance and the performance of two French and Italian groups of wine cooperatives, with two objectives in mind. On one hand, the study will analyse the presence of similarities between the characteristics of the two groups of companies which were founded in the same period within a similar legal framework; on the other, it will study the presence of links between the strategic policy of the companies and their structural, governance and performance characteristics. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses survey data obtained from interviews with 25 wine cooperatives. It covers the topics of their structure, organisation, strategies, management and performance in Italy (specifically in Umbria, a region in the centre of Italy), and in France (in Languedoc-Roussillon, a region in southern France). Other indicators of performance, calculated from the balance sheets of the companies, were added to this analysis, and a careful analysis was drawn up to check the factors which condition the performance of the companies. Findings – The main finding underlines some strong differentiating elements between those cooperatives selling the biggest part of their production as bulk wine and those selling it as packaged wine. But the first situation does not lead automatically to inferring a decline or an involution of these cooperatives. On the contrary, the mitigated performances that were found clearly question whether there is a strategic evolution towards more specialisation (intermediate phases of product transformation, leading to business-to-business differentiation strategies) which could be more profitable for their growers-owners than further integration towards packaged wine sales. Originality/value – The analysis deals with the problem of performance and governance of the transformation cooperative companies in the wine sector, which produce more than 50 percent of the entire wine production both in France and Italy.

Extra virgin olive oil sustainability shows that it is strictly connected to local production and certifications. However, consumers’ behaviour toward a local product is tied with the information exchange between producers and consumers. The aim of the research is to analyse, using a logistic regression model, if the attitudes, habits, and behaviours of the consumers influence their opinion on the sustainability of local extra virgin olive oil, relative to the three dimensions of sustainability (environmental, socio-cultural, and economic). This study tries to combine studies about agri-food sustainability and consumers’ behaviour about local consumption, in an attempt to evaluate their attitude towards an agroecology food regime. Indeed, this information can be useful in order to plan adequate and specific interventions to improve the sustainability of the extra virgin olive oil production. The results indicate that the opinion about the sustainability of local extra virgin olive oil is linked to the information exchange between producers and consumers. This confirms that local alternative trade channels require numerous interventions in order to simplify and improve such exchange, both from a managerial and political point of view. Moreover, it can be useful to develop the information and communication technologies, in order to ensure the reliability, the transparency, and the security of the information exchange. This can also be useful to prevent frauds that are very common for this product.