The role of trust, expectation, and deception when buying organic animal products.

Over the last years, consumer interest in how livestock is raised and handled and thus how animal-based products such as milk, meat, and eggs are produced, has increased in the Western world (Alonso et al., 2020). As a result, several marketdriven initiatives tackling consumer demand for products produced with higher animal welfare standards were introduced (Esbjerg et al., 2022). Nowadays, consumers are confronted with a variety of front-of-package food labels such as the “Beter Leven” label in the Netherlands or the “Initiative Tierwohl” in Germany. The most well-known and widespread label associated with animal welfare from a consumer’s perspective is the organic label (Schleenbecker and Hamm, 2013; Meyer-Höfer et al., 2015; Figure 1): more than 95% of German consumers are familiar with the German organic label (Zühlsdorf et al., 2016) and the more animal-friendly husbandry systems are the most important buying motive for organic meat consumers (Zander and Hamm, 2009). Labels, such as the organic label, are needed to help consumers make purchasing decisions according to their preferences. Without these labels, consumers would not be able to identify how animal-based products were produced as the keeping of animals is a so-called “credence attribute” that cannot be verified on the product itself (Darby and Karni, 1973). Consumers neither have the possibility nor the expertise to control the promised product characteristics, such as keeping and feeding of the animals. Therefore, trust in the label and certification is crucial when buying organic products (Nuttavuthisit and Thøgersen, 2017). Previous research has shown that higher levels of trust are associated with higher confidence that the products meet the promised standards (Wu et al., 2021). In contrast, distrust lowers the expectations and thus makes it less likely that consumers buy a labeled product (Nuttavuthisit and Thøgersen, 2017). To guarantee that products adhere to the promised standards, and thus increase consumer trust, credible and understandable third-party certification schemes are often used to monitor the production process (Alonso et al., 2020). Such labels serve to inform consumers about the standards behind them in a simplified way as consumer knowledge about livestock farming is limited (Di Pasquale et al., 2014). The low level of knowledge along with positive perceptions of organic can lead consumers to have false associations or overly high expectations of organic animal products and the respective husbandry systems (Hermansen, 2003). Von Meyer-Höfer et al. (2015) conclude in their study that, from an overarching perspective, there