Consumer awareness of livestock-related regulations and programs
1. HACCP: “I have never heard of it/I don’t know exactly what it is” 68.3%, “I am familiar with it” 31.7%
- HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) is a sanitation control program for livestock production and processing.
- 36.5% of respondents answered “I have heard of it, but I don’t exactly what it is about,” and 31.8% answered “I have never heard of it,” indicating that as many as 68.3% of total respondents were insufficiently or not at all informed about the program. What this result suggests is that, although the government has been introducing a variety of safety control measures for livestock products, consumers, the intended beneficiaries of these programs, have been kept in the dark.
2. Confidence in certification marks: “I trust them” 58.5%, “I don’t trust them” 41.5%
- When asked whether and how much they trust HACCP and other certification marks granted to livestock products, 53.0% of respondents answered “I trust them somewhat,” and 5.5% chose “I completely trust them.” In other words, certification marks were trusted by only 58.5% of total surveyees, and 41.5%, the rest of respondents, had misgivings about them.
3. Whether certification marks influence purchase decision: “I consider them in my purchase decision” 45.1%, “I don’t consider them in my purchase decision” 54.9%
4. Awareness of traceability program: ‘I don’t really know’ 66.6%, ‘I am familiar with it’ 33.4%
- Livestock traceability is a system whereby all information relating to meat and dairy products, from production and processing to distribution are recorded so that they can be traced back from end consumers through the supply chain.
- 35.3% of respondents answered “I have heard of it, but I don’t know what it is exactly,” and 31.3%, “I have never heard of it.” In other words, 66.6% of total respondents possessed insufficient knowledge of the livestock traceability program.
5. Effectiveness of the traceability program: 91.6% of those respondents who said that they knew about the program answered that it was “helpful.”
6. Country-of-origin disclosure requirement for restaurants: “Absolutely necessary” 49.4%, “Useless” 24.5%
- The greatest number of respondents (49.4%) answered “indispensable for informed consumer choice,” whereas 24.6% chose the answer “It will have no effect at all, since there is no means in place to control false disclosures.”
7. Livestock safety control systems: “Must be consolidated” 30.9%, “Doesn’t really matter” 22.6%, “Must reflect individual needs” 22%
- Meanwhile, 19.8% answered “Might make it difficult to determine where the fault lies in the case of a problem.”
8. How to increase the consumption of domestic beef: “Improve meat quality” 48.7%, “Lower the price” 36.1%
- To the question “What can we do to differentiate Korean beef from imported beef and increase its consumption?” 48.7% chose the answer “Make domestic beef safer and improve quality.”
- The overall message in these results is that the government’s efforts to strengthen livestock-related safety mechanisms through such initiatives as livestock traceability, expanded application of HACCP, increased staffing of Honorary Livestock Watchers Board, and making control and oversight more strict, fail to positively affect consumer confidence in the meat industry, as the general public is unaware of these new measures. The government therefore needs to look into beefing up its communications effort by educating consumers and by launching information campaigns using mass media so as to regain the consumers’ confidence.
