Investigating Consumers’ Preference on Fresh Vegetables in Bangladesh: Best-Worst Scaling Approach

Abstract

Safety vegetables are nutritionally essential for our good health, but we are daily fighting against to take “Safe and Fresh Vegetables” for “sake of “Good Health” due to contamination, adulterations and pesticides residues effects. The aim of the study was to examine the consumers’ preference for food quality and safety attributes of fresh vegetables by using quality and safety attributes of fresh vegetables using the best-worst scaling technique. The balanced incomplete block design procedure was employed to obtain a total 180 sample from Dhaka and Mymensingh city of Bangladesh. The data were collected through survey monkey software by using the pre-determined structured questionnaire and analyzed by the MaxDiff scaling and multinomial mixed logit regression model. The results revealed that fresh vegetable attributes were a combination of size, appearance, texture, freshness, and flavor as well as nutritional ingredients and safety aspects that determine their value to the consumer. The fresh vegetables contained vitamins, minerals and dietary fiber that satisfied consumer demand and helped to keep healthy and protect from diseases. The researchers found that nutritional value, purity, freshness, shelf life and safety are the most important attributes of fresh vegetables and variety, size, content, colour are the least important for the consumers. The study concludes that demand for can be significantly stimulated in the study area when these most important attributes have been considered by producers, processors, and marketers.