U.S. tend to consume more breakfast cereals. Furthermore, breakfast cereal is considered as a
relatively expensive food item.
Willingness to Pay for Non-GM Foods
Based on the methodology described above, the willingness to pay (WTP) for the three
non-GM foods can be computed for the entire sample and the results are presented in Table 4.
Note that we compute first the WTP household by household. The figures presented in the table
are simply means or averages of all households in the sample. The WTP for non-GM product
reflects the premium for the non-GM food that the consumer is willing to pay. We also compute
the percentage of premium using the price of GM food as the base. Since there are different
prices for GM foods used in the four versions of price scenarios, the percentage figures vary
depending on the base price. The results show that the survey respondents are willing to pay a
premium of 5-8% for non-GM vegetable oil, 15-28% for non-GM salmon, and 12-17% for non-
GM corn flake breakfast cereal.
Table 5 shows the computed WTP premiums for various demographic groups by sex,
age, and race. It is interesting to observe that the WTP premiums for non-GM foods vary by
demographic groups. Note that even though some demographic variables may not be significant
in the Logit model, the computed WTP premiums can still be different among demographic
groups. This is because the WTP is based on the entire model and the entire set of estimated
parameters, not just the coefficient related to a particular demographic variable. The results are
very telling that female respondents are always willing to pay a higher premium for non-GM
food products than male respondents, especially in the case of vegetable oil and corn flake
breakfast cereal. This finding is in accordance with previous studies regarding consumer WTP on
organic food produce (Huang, et al., 1993).
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