Consumer preferences and willingness to pay for existing and new apple varieties: Evidence from apple tasting choice experiments

We used choice experiments to investigate consumers' preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for various apple (Malus×domestica) varieties. The experiments also asked consumers to evaluate a series of quality attributes by allowing them to taste apples. The choice experiments were conducted in real markets where consumers were making fruit purchases to eliminate any decontextualized biases. The objectives of this study were to determine how much consumers are willing to pay for 13 new and existing apple varieties and learn what quality attributes consumers' like or dislike in new vs. older apple varieties. Results show that compared with other apple varieties, participants were willing to pay the highest prices for 'SweeTango®', followed by 'Zestar!™' and 'Honeycrisp'. Frequent and infrequent buyers were willing to pay significantly different amounts for most of the studied varieties. In addition to WTP estimates, our study also shows what quality attributes consumers consider as improvements compared with existing varieties. Combined with objective measures of these quality attributes, our transdisciplinary study will help apple breeders make more targeted breeding decisions by better understanding what quality attributes consumers like or dislike about the studied varieties.