Are people willing to pay to avoid harm from international honey laundering?

You probably had to read the title of this post a couple of times. Yes, it does say honey laundering, with an "h". It's taken from the title of this paper, by Chian Jones Ritten (University of Wyoming) and co-authors, published in the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics earlier this year (sorry, I don't see an ungated version). The paper focuses on food fraud, which refers to "the intentional substitution, addition, tampering or misrepresentation of food, food ingredients, or food packaging". They note that:

Evidence suggests that Chinese honey is being transshipped and relabelled to mask the true origin of the honey to avoid large tariffs and potential bans, also known as honey laundering... The practice of honey laundering is so prolific that an estimated one-third of honey available for sale in the United States is illegally imported from China and may contain illegal antibiotics and heavy metals...

The focus on Chinese honey is important because:

Chinese honey has the potential to contain illegal and unsafe antibiotics (specifically, Chloramphenicol, enrofloxacin, and ciprofloxacin) and high levels of herbicides and pesticides...

But do honey consumers care? Essentially, Jones Ritten et al. ran an experiment to test whether consumers were willing to pay a US$2.48 premium for an eight-ounce jar of locally produced honey, and tested whether consumers who were first given information about "the negative health implications of honey laundering" were more willing to pay the premium. They found that:

In total, 53.38% of participants across the treatments chose local honey at a $2.48 premium over honey of unknown origin...

Once we control for only honey preferences and use, access to honey laundering information significantly increases the probability (P < 0.10) of participants being willing to pay a $2.48 premium for an 8-ounce jar of local honey... When also including the influence of demographic variables on the probability of paying the premium, honey laundering information still significantly increases the probability (P < 0.05) of participants choosing local honey...

The results suggest that providing honey laundering information increases the probability of participants being willing to pay the premium by as much as 27 percentage points...

So, consumer information does affect consumers' stated preferences for honey, but not for everyone. However, my last sentence also highlights the problem with this study. They only asked what the consumers would do (their stated preference), and didn't actually require a honey purchase (which would be a revealed preference). So, we don't know whether the consumers would actually follow through on their stated preference. Perhaps they could have required a honey purchase?

It also turns out that older consumers were more willing to pay the premium, which led the authors to conclude that:

Targeting older consumers will most likely be successful at garnering more local consumers that are willing to pay for local honey than targeting younger consumers.

However, if older consumers are already more willing to buy locally produced honey, that doesn't mean that the information had a bigger effect on them. The authors could have tested that directly with their data, by running separate analyses for different age groups, or interacting the experimental treatment variable with age, but for some reason they chose not to.

Aside from those issues, it is a nice study. If you want to avoid international honey laundering, buy local.