Dynamics of the Austrian Food Market: Application of Lotka-Volterra Differential Equations

Abstract

The organic food market has become an important part of food industry. We analyze sales data from Austria for 2014 to 2020 of 124 products from 25 product groups in six categories, each in conventional and organic form. We fitted their market shares by means of a modified Lotka-Volterra model with constant coefficients. When only organic and conventional products were compared, a significant increase in market shares was observed for 15 of 25 organic product groups, indicating a continuing growth of the organic food market. The typical Lotka-Volterra dynamics was a predator-prey dynamics with an organic product (group) predating on conventional products that were in symbiosis.