Analysis of consumer preferences for fresh vegetables in the colombian Caribbean

Abstract

The objective of this work was to analyze consumer preferences when deciding on purchasing fresh vegetables in the Caribbean region in order to obtain organized information for decision making about possibility of expanding agricultural product supply. A structured survey with socioeconomic variables for consumer and others such as purchase frequency, main vegetables consumed, purchase site was applied to 308 consumer families randomly selected in the seven main cities of the Caribbean Region. For the analysis, contingency tables, descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and analysis of variance were used. The results allowed to find that carrot, white onion, squash and tomato are the most preferred vegetables with an average 1.79 kilos per purchase. The collected data showed a relation between consumption and consumer age, People 50 year old, and older, prefer more vegetables, bacause of nutritional value and health benefits. It was evidenced that purchase site is highly related to consumer economic level, as higher economic income consumers prefer purchasing in griocery stoores, while low income consumers purchase in public markets and neighborhood markets.

Keywords

• consumer
• income
• satisfaction
• choice
• market
• price