The Clients of Specialized Organic Retailers in Italy

Aims: The organic share of the Italian food market is still small, probably below 2%, but is growing steadily, with a progressive expansion of different typologies of points of sale. The Italian consumers of organic products have been studied by many authors, from different points of view and with different methodologies, but this specific segment – the clients of specialised and certified organic retailers, had never been investigated in detail.

Study Design: Questionnaire for clients developed in collaboration with experts and focus group participants; random selection of geographically representative certified points of sale; validation of results with other focus groups.

Place and Duration of Study: Italy, between March and September 2010.

Methodology: In a representative sample of 46 certified points of sale scattered all over Italy, a total of 845 valid questionnaires containing 23 questions have been filled by the clients. Their demographic data and several other variables have been used with a clustering procedure.

Results: Six different groups have been formed: The “indifferent consumers” with 9% of respondents, the “increased” with 16.9%, the “regular unhappy” with 32.1%, the “occasional” with 4.4%, the “occasional not informed” with 6% and the “convinced and frequent” with 31.6% of the respondents.

Conclusion: Also the clients of this type of retailers, who are supposedly more informed and motivated than in other points of sale, are not an homogeneous group and they show a widespread belief that prices are too high; still there is a lack of information about the public goods generated by organic agriculture. More and better information should be consequently supplied to consumers, to avoid their search for cheaper organic products, in other categories of points of sale.