Regulating menu information: What do consumers care and not care about at casual and fine dining restaurants for seafood consumption?

Abstract

This research aims to fill the information gap between the increase in food consumption away from home and the lack of understanding of Americans’ preferences for information transparency of food served in casual and fine dining restaurants. Online discrete choice experiments are applied to elicit consumer preferences for transparency of seafood entrée attributes. Consumers strongly prefer entrées with transparent information on species specification, country of origin, production methods, sustainability certification, and sustainability rating. At fine dining restaurants, the most important attributes are sustainability rating, species specification, and price, whereas sustainability rating, species specification, and sustainability certification are the top three attributes at casual restaurants. Furthermore, sustainable certification significantly increases the probability of an entrée being selected, and low-value species benefit more from the sustainability certification than do high-value species. These results provide useful insights for restaurateurs, suppliers, and policymakers to implement appropriate menu policies to improve information transparency and minimize food fraud in the seafood supply chain.