Organic Food or Conventional Food? Consumer Reaction to Unexpected Spoilage May Differ

It was the hamburger that pushed the two marketing professors into a new research project.

Not just any hamburger; it was a Burger King Whopper. This Whopper, without the benefit of any artificial preservatives, had been deteriorating in front of a camera recording its decline with time-lapse photography for 48 days. This was done by the advertising agency David in February 2020 to announce Burger King’s new promise to its customers that all artificial preservatives would be removed from its U.S. products by the end of that year.

Ahmet Murat Hattat, Lawrence Technological University’s assistant professor of marketing, and Timucin Ozcan, James Madison University associate professor of marketing, were fascinated by the campaign. Beyond the obvious iconoclastic approach of featuring a major household consumer brand’s signature product in an unflattering way, the campaign poked at another, related food spoilage issue which these two marketers had been considering.

“As organic food products have become increasingly popular due to perceived health and environmental benefits, we noticed a gap in understanding how consumers react to the spoilage of organic versus conventional perishable goods,” Hattat said. “Given the generally higher price point and perceived quality of organic products, one might expect consumers to react more negatively to the spoilage of these items. However, anecdotal evidence and initial observations suggested that consumers might be more forgiving of spoilage in organic products due to their associations with naturalness and the absence of preservatives.” Hattat went on to say that “the controversial Burger King campaign, which featured a moldy Whopper to emphasize the absence of artificial preservatives, resonated with me and [Dr. Ozcan]. It made us question whether there was a deeper psychological mechanism at play that made consumers more forgiving towards spoilage in certain contexts.”

The professors conducted their investigation in 2023-2024 with one pilot and four actual studies with experiments focused on reactions to spoilage or staleness in four everyday household food products: bananas, pre-packaged spring salad mix, fresh blueberries, and loaves of bread. The reactions of over 500 consumers in total were tabulated and analyzed, with each individual study being very similar but having some differences in methodology. Their findings were published on July 31, 2024 in the journal Psychology & Marketing.

“Given the generally higher price point and perceived quality of organic products, one might expect consumers to react more negatively to the spoilage of these items. However…consumers might be more forgiving of spoilage in organic products due to their associations with naturalness and the absence of preservatives.”
Ahmet Murat Hattat

In the pilot study, consumers’ tendency to favor an organic product even in an almost-spoiled condition was demonstrated as behavioral evidence. Hattat and Ozcan designed an actual online choice study for 200 participants. The participants were given “funding” to decide between Dole-branded bananas and an unbranded organic kind. When the Dole banana was perfect, the choice share was 50% but dropped to 20% when it was almost spoiled. The organic banana had an 80% choice share when perfect, but amazingly, when almost spoiled, still garnered a 50% choice share, only a 38% erosion.

The professors followed the pilot with a first study in March 2023 that was a deep dive into the customer reviews of produce posted on target.com. After sifting through consumer reviews of products with facing organic counterparts from the same brand and adding in a sentiment analysis procedure to measure the emotion evident in the responses, the same result emerged: when products were organic, spoilage caused significantly less “anger” than with conventional products.

Boxes of salad mix were the focus of the second study. Consumers were asked to envision reactions to spoilage in standard versus organic salad mixes purchased from a grocery store’s web site and delivered to the home. Again, when product spoilage was unexpected, the study participants felt “angrier” toward the standard salad mix than the organic version.

The third study removed variables such as the involvement of a delivery person in selecting spoiled items. The context was also simplified, leaving only conventional versus organic labeling as the information provided to the participants for boxes of blueberries. With these changes for a more conservative study, the same result was realized. Consumer “anger” and negative feelings toward organic blueberry spoilage were considerably less than those prompted by deterioration of conventional blueberries.

The 200 participants in the fourth study were shown a $10 bag of organic bread from a bakery and a similar conventional loaf of bread for $4. When spoilage occurred, more participants indicated negative behavioral intentions such as wanting to return the products or intending not to buy them again. Consumers may not be as forgiving of product deterioration in organic products when they are more expensive.

Concluding that the level of emotion shown when organic product spoilage occurs is decidedly more moderate than the greater “anger” displayed when the equivalent conventional product from a mass-market brand or volume retailer fails – until the price of the organic product is so much higher. These findings have important implications for food producers, retailers, manufacturers, and marketers in the design and promotion of products.

Far from being a dry academic study, Hattat and Ozcan have produced valuable research work with compelling relevance now not just for marketing, retailing, and product distribution but for its reflections on consumer behavior.

“I am proud to recognize the highquality scholarship of Professor Murat Hattat, whose recent publication in Psychology & Marketing exemplifies the innovative research emerging from our AACSB-accredited programs in the College of Business & Information Technology at Lawrence Technological University,” said Matthew Cole, Dean of the College of Business and IT.

Read the complete study.