Progress report for GNE24-339
Project Information
Culinary trails are emerging as a new framework to organize, market, and brand the signature assets of a region. Through applied research, this project will make two significant contributions to the economic viability of sustainable agriculture: 1) it will be the first longitudinal study to determine whether engagement in agritourism generates consumer loyalty for state-branded farm, fish, and fiber products; and 2) it will be the first study to determine whether culinary trails are an effective form of branding for industries and destinations. The control group will be a panel of 600 U.S. consumers who participate in a virtual shopping experiment. These results will be evaluated against consumers who participate in one of three treatments, resulting in 10 data collection points with 1,800 respondents: 1) festival promoting New England products; 2) festival for Maine-branded farm, fish, and fiber products; and 3) agritourism experiences on culinary trails promoting Maine-branded farm, fish, and fiber products. Results will be shared through peer-reviewed journal articles and conference presentations to agritourism operators, state policymakers, Cooperative Extension and Sea Grant agents, and marketing researchers at the state, national, and international level. By exploring how experiences on culinary trails affects consumer loyalty for state-branded farm, fiber, and fish products, this project will help producers and service providers alike determine whether limited marketing dollars on regional agritourism promotion provide a substantial return on investment compared to other forms of education.
The control group will consist of a panel of consumers representative of the U.S. population who participate in a virtual shopping experiment. Additional consumers include those participating in one of three treatments: 1) regional consumers who participate in a festival promoting New England products; 2) regional consumers who participate in a festival for Maine-branded farm, fish, and fiber products; and 3) visitors who participate in an agritourism experience promoting Maine-branded farm, fish, and fiber products. Respondents will be surveyed twice – immediately after participating in a festival or
experience, and again, two months following the experience. Emotion is the strongest driver of consumer loyalty. Factors that contribute to emotional loyalty include trust, shared values, perceived quality, superior customer service, and a personalized experience. These factors not only promote repeat purchase behavior but engagement, commitment, and advocacy toward the brand.
This work will address the following objectives:
1. To determine whether agritourism drives direct sales of state-branded farm, fish, and fiber products.
H1: There is no statistically significant difference between the control and treatment groups on their preference for local products.
2. To determine whether agritourism shapes values associated with emotional consumer loyalty.
H2: There is no statistically significant difference between the control and treatment groups on their values, beliefs, and attitudes toward local products (locavorism).
H2a: Educational attainment has no effect on locavorism.
H2b: Household income has no effect on locavorism.
3. To determine whether emotional consumer loyalty has a latent impact on purchase behavior.
H3: There is no statistically significant difference between the control and treatment groups on consumer loyalty toward local products.
H3a: Within subjects, participation in agritourism has no influence on consumer loyalty for local products.
In addition to the quantitative component, a qualitative research study will be conducted with 30 producers along the Maine oyster, fiber, and cheese trails to explore the following questions:
1. How do individual farmers and fishermen perceive and describe the benefits and challenges of agritourism to their industries and regions?
2. How do farmers and fishermen describe how their members work together as an industry cluster to promote agritourism, for example, through strategies like cooperation, communication, coordination and collaboration?
This qualitative research study will help determine whether culinary trails are an effective form of branding for destinations and industries.
The purpose of this project is to determine how agritourism affects purchase intent, willingness-to-pay, and consumer loyalty for state-branded farm, fiber, and fish products compared to other forms of education. This new knowledge will advance Northeast SARE’s outcome of ensuring the economic viability of sustainable agriculture.
Agritourism offers a variety of benefits to producers, consumers, tourists, communities, and regions. For producers, agritourism is a form of economic diversification that enables them to increase sales revenue, generate supplemental income, attract new customers, and provide employment for family and friends (Chase, et al, 2021; Paras, et al, 2022; Schilling, et al, 2014; Tew & Barbieri, 2012). Through agritourism, consumers have the opportunity to learn how food is raised, grown, and harvested while enjoying family-friendly activities, outdoor recreation, and other pursuits (Barbieri, et al, 2018; Brune, et al, 2021). For tourists, agritourism offers an authentic experience that connects them to a place (Andéhn & L’Espoir Decosta, 2021; Nazariadli, et al, 2018; Palmi & Lezzi, 2020). Communities that host a cluster of agritourism opportunities can market these assets as a distinctive culinary trail or destination (Niedbala, 2020; Paras & Michaud, 2023). By helping small farms diversify their income, regions can promote rural economic development (Van Sandt, et al, 2019) and brand their distinctive local food products (Che, 2006), thereby increasing the contribution of tourism, agriculture and fisheries to their Gross Domestic Product (Dhungana & Khanal, 2023; Rossi, et al, 2017).
Culinary trails are emerging as a new framework to organize, market, and brand the signature assets of a region for both agritourism and destination marketing. A trail may consist of an inventory of agritourism experiences on working farms and fisheries that invite visitors to curate their own itineraries. Beginning with the Maine Beer Trail in 2009, Maine has been a national leader in the design, development, and promotion of culinary trails, with the establishment of the Maine Cheese Trail, Maine Fiber Trail, and Maine Oyster Trail. In addition to trails, trade associations have also developed open farm days for specialty crops, including Maine Maple Sunday (March), Maine Seaweed Week (April), Wild Blueberry Weekend (August), Maine Apple Sunday (September) and Open Creamery Day (October). These events offer working producers that may not be open the rest of the year the opportunity to offer direct sales, as well as family-friendly activities. In addition, some associations, like those for seaweed and blueberries, partner with restaurants and other eating and drinking establishments to showcase signature menu items and specials made with seasonal ingredients.
Through tours, U-pick, and other outdoor activities in scenic landscapes, culinary trails engage visitors in co-creating authentic experiences with producers that have the potential to generate the emotional attachment that is the foundation of consumer loyalty (Ghorbanzadeh, & Rahehagh, 2021; Hwang, & Kandampully, 2012; Park & MacInnis, 2006; Yu & Dean, 2001). By generating consumer loyalty, producers can shape the brand of their establishment, industry, and region while facilitating repeat purchase behavior in real time as well as into the future. While research demonstrates that agritourism increases consumers’ intentions to purchase local food (Brune, et al, 2021; Kenebayeva, et al, 2014; Paras & Michaud, 2023), no study has explored whether this intention translates to actual purchase behavior following participation. Indeed, Brune, et al (2021) recommended that “future studies should include follow-up surveys to gauge the participants’ actual local food consumption behaviors over time” (p. 1328).
Beyond wine tourism, there is also a gap in the literature on the effectiveness of culinary trails as a branding strategy for industries and destinations. Besides the PI’s own research, peer-reviewed articles are limited to descriptive case studies of culinary trails in Poland (Przemysław, et al, 2017; Topczewska, et al, 2022). Iconic commodities indelibly linked to specific U.S. states include Alaskan salmon, Florida oranges, Georgia peaches, Hawaiian pineapple, Idaho potatoes, Iowa corn, Kentucky bourbon, Louisiana catfish, Maine lobster, Maryland crabs, Texas beef, Vermont maple syrup, Virginia ham, Washington apples, and Wisconsin cheese. Websites hosted by offices of tourism attract visitors to agritourism experiences in rural areas through search portals, itineraries, trails, and other tools. Indeed, there is just one U.S. states that does not market a distinct brand for local products. Yet peer-reviewed research on state brands has been limited to consumer awareness and willingness-to-pay studies and not actual participation in agritourism experiences.
Therefore, this stand-alone project seeks to answer the following questions:
- Does engagement in agritourism generate consumer loyalty for state-branded farm, fish, and fiber products?
- Are culinary trails an effective form of branding industries and destinations?
Research
Research design. The project will conduct a series of field experiments that generate quantitative and qualitative data to address the following objectives:
- To determine whether agritourism drives direct sales of state-branded farm, fish, and fiber products.
- To determine whether agritourism shapes values associated with emotional consumer loyalty.
- To determine whether emotional consumer loyalty has a latent impact on purchase behavior.
- To determine whether culinary trails are an effective form of industry branding.
- To determine whether culinary trails are an effective form of destination branding.
These experiments will be conducted from November 1, 2024 to November 30, 2025. Since the project involves human subjects research, approval from the University of Maine’s Institutional Review Board will be sought in three phases: 1) control group of a panel of 600 U.S. consumers; 2) online and in-person surveys of 2,400 consumers participating in a treatment – festival, agritourism experience, or information condition; and 3) interviews with producers and industry professionals associated with trail planning and implementation. For research design, see SARE report_011525.
Survey topics: Components of the consumer survey will include the following:
- Type of treatment in which the respondent participated: festival or agritourism activity, such as a tour, course, demonstration, outdoor recreation, and/or sampling (Objective 1).
- Willingness to pay for a state-branded versus conventional product using a discrete choice experiment with attributes on brand, perceived quality, place of origin, and price (Objective 1).
- Consumer loyalty behavior toward local food using a validated scale (Bagozzi et al, 2017), including repeat purchase intention and/or behavior (Objectives 2, 3, 4, 5).
- Values, beliefs, and attitudes toward local food using a validated scale to measure locavorism (Reich et al, 2018).
- Demographics, including gender, age, race and ethnicity, household income, educational attainment, work status, and zip code.
- Perceived benefits of culinary trails at the establishment and industry level (Objectives 4, 5).
- Strategies for cooperation, communication, coordination, and collaboration at the industry and region level (Objectives 4, 5).
Participants: For the consumer survey, the target population for the survey is adults, age 18 and over, who live in the United States. Due to the context in which the survey is administered, approximately half of respondents will either be residents and/or tourists in New England. For the industry survey, the target population is producers who host agritourism opportunities on a culinary trail.
Data collection
Consumers. The consumer survey will be implemented in five different formats: 1) virtual shopping environment, which will generate a baseline of data from U.S. consumers toward state-branded farm, fish, and fiber products versus conventional products; 2) same as #1 but with an information condition that provides an story about the local producer; 3) in-person survey of consumers who participate in a regional commodity-specific festival; 3) in-person survey of consumers who participate in a Maine commodity-specific festival; and 3) online survey administered to visitors who participate in an agritourism experience on the Maine cheese, oyster, or fiber trails. In addition, the survey will be made available via QR code, enabling subjects to complete it on their own mobile device in real time or following the event. Through the opportunity to win product or branded merchandise, visitors will be encouraged to provide their email address in order to facilitate administration of the follow-up survey two months following their initial participation. Consumers who participate in agritourism activities will be surveyed again 2-3 months later to determine whether their experience contributed to the development of the antecedents of consumer loyalty.
Both the control and treatment groups will participate in a discrete choice experiment where they will make a choice on their willingness to purchase a local versus national brand. Then they will rank the importance of the following attributes in making this choice, including brand, perceived quality, place of origin, and price.
Industry. In addition to consumers, 10 producers and industry professionals associated with each trail will be interviewed to explore 1) how individual farmers and fishermen perceive and describe the benefits and challenges of agritourism to their industries and regions; and 2) how farmers and fishermen describe how their members work together as an industry cluster to promote agritourism, for example, through strategies like cooperation, communication, coordination and collaboration. This dataset will be used to determine how effectively producers work together to plan, implement, and promote culinary trails (Porter, 1998; Ruiz-Labrador et al, 2023; Wulandari et al, 2024).
The cheese, fiber, and oyster sectors were selected for analysis for parallel reasons. First, each has developed a culinary trail with a choose-your-own adventure format marketed to consumers online; 2) each sector sponsors a Maine festival that engages producers as sellers; each represents an emerging industry product that Maine is not particularly known for; and each represents a moderately priced product that consumers might be willing to order online. For example, Maine has a monopoly on the nation’s supply of lobster. Besides lobster being a non-SARE eligible product, it is considered a luxury good that consumers do not purchase frequently. Moreover, there are no comparable products on the market for comparison purposes. While potatoes are also one of Maine’s signature products, the industry has not developed any agritourism opportunities, only a summer festival that does not include tours of either factories or farms.
Materials: All survey responses will be entered by participants themselves on the Qualtrics platform. To generate baseline data, the control group survey will be recruited through Prolific, a platform that provides researchers with access to a pre-qualified panel with demographics representative of the U.S. population. Other subjects will be recruited at both festivals and agritourism venues. In order to solicit responses at festivals, the PI will set up a pop-up booth with four chairs where visitors can participate in the survey via iPad. In addition, a QR code will be posted so that visitors can participate in the survey on their own mobile device in real time or at their own convenience. Due to the dispersed rural nature of agritourism operations, different methods will be deployed at the establishment level: 1) link to the survey will be emailed to visitors who either check-in via QR code or voluntarily provide their email during the open farm registration or sales process; and 2) postcards with a QR code promoting the survey will be sent to participating establishments to enable visitors to conduct the survey in real time or at their own convenience. Survey results will be analyzed using IBM’s SPSS software (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences).
Figure 1 outlines the 10 data collection points for U.S. consumers by product, treatment, month, format, and sample size per treatment.
Power analysis. The experiments involve 3 products x 5 treatments, resulting in 15 groups. The minimum sample size to achieve 90% power is 124 observations per sample. With a proposed sample size of 200 and an alpha of 0.01, the power of the experiment is 0.997. The larger sample size was chosen in order to account for incomplete responses, as well as dropouts from the initial to the follow-up survey.
Analytics strategies. This study will deploy four analytical strategies:
- Descriptive statistics will be used to summarize the demographics and psychographics of respondents.
- Discrete choice experiment involving a national versus local brand will be used to determine the baseline premium for Maine products compared to conventional goods.
- One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) will be used to determine whether there is a statistical difference among means between the control group and the three treatments in terms of willingness to pay, purchase intent, emotional loyalty, and repeat purchase behavior.
- Qualitative analysis using the principles of Grounded Theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) will be used to analyze interviews with producers and industry professionals.
During the Fall of 2024, the graduate student developed draft survey instruments for both the qualitative and quantitative (Draft IRB_011125) components of this research study as part of two courses at the University of Maine: Economics 503 (Experimental Economics) and Education & Human Development (EHD) 571 (Qualitative Research Methods). These instruments were reviewed by the professors of both courses as well as each member of the student's PhD dissertation committee. In total, seven professors affiliated with the University of Maine, University of Southern Maine, and the University of New England in the fields of Economics, Food Science, Business, and Tourism & Hospitality reviewed the research protocols and the survey instruments. From this total, six approved the research design as substantially outlined while one objected, necessitating replacement on the committee. Feedback will be incorporated into research design before submission to the University of Maine's Institutional Review Board. Substantive feedback included 1) incorporation of an information condition to the online experiment, creating a fourth treatment group; 2) reducing the number of choices in the discrete choice experiment from four to two; 3) randomizing the order of attributes in the discrete choice experiment; and 4) offering the local choice at different price points.
As part of EHD 571, the interview protocol (Research Outline_011125) was beta tested with two producers affiliated with the Maine Cheese Guild and Maine Fibershed. In addition, an observation was conducted at a site on the Maine Fiber Trail. Both interviews were transcribed and coded, resulting in the development of 1) preliminary code list (Code list_011125) with first and second level codes; and 2) a conceptual framework (Model 1) for interpretation. Reflections from all three activities will be incorporated into the final research design for IRB submission.
References
Bagozzi, R. P., Batra, R., & Ahuvia, A. (2017). Brand love: development and validation of a practical scale. Marketing Letters, 28(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-016-9406-1
Porter, M. E. (1998). Clusters and the new economics of competition. Harvard Business Review, 76(6), 77.
Reich, B. J., Beck, J. T., & Price, J. (2018). Food as ideology: Measurement and validation of locavorism. The Journal of Consumer Research, 45(4), 849–868. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucy027
Ruiz-Labrador, E.-E., Sánchez-Martín, J.-M., & Gurría-Gascón, J.-L. (2023). The agritourism value chain: An application to the Dehesa areas of Extremadura. Agriculture (Basel), 13(11), 2078-. https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture13112078
Wulandari, S., Sutrisno, J., Yusuf, E. S., & Komalawati, K. (2024). Developing industry clusters based on 4As to support agritourism competitiveness. IOP Conference Series. Earth and Environmental Science, 1364(1), 12033-. https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/1364/1/012033
Education & Outreach Activities and Participation Summary
Participation Summary:
This project will disseminate results to statewide, national, and international audiences. At the state level, dissemination will occur through the following channels:
Maine Agricultural Trade Show: Hosted by the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry, the trade show is an annual event held in the state’s capitol that attracts hundreds of producers and policymakers over a three-day period to learn about current research and business trends that affect agriculture, natural resource management, and food systems. In 2024, the state held its first agritourism summit as part of the trade show. The project will share results with the industry through both a presentation and a booth with collateral materials.
Food Industry Associations: Maine is home to 15,000 farmers and fishermen. These producers are supported by a robust group of trade associations for commodities, specialty crops, and value-added products, including wild blueberries, potatoes, oyster, cheese, fiber, milk, aquaculture, seaweed, grains, apples, maple syrup, lobster, beer, wine, and spirits. Project results will be distributed to the leaders of each trade group who, in turn, will distribute to their members via email. In addition, offers will be made to present results at a future board meeting. By recording these presentations, producers unable to attend will have another opportunity to watch on demand.
State Agencies: A user-friendly summary of results will also be prepared for distribution by state agencies, including Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation & Fisheries, University of Maine Cooperative Extension, Maine Sea Grant, Maine Office of Tourism, and Maine Department of Economic and Community Development. These agencies have access to thousands of Maine entities that may be interested in results, including producers, manufacturers, industry associations, chambers of commerce, destination marketing organizations, and other interested parties that develop, promote, and/or operate agritourism activities. Letters of support from these agencies detailing their level of interest are attached.
Maine Policy Review is a peer-review journal published twice per year by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. The journal is an open-source publication available for free online without a subscription. Project results will be shared via a journal article intended to reach the academic, government, and business community, including agents with Cooperative Extension and Maine Sea Grant along with managers representing tourism, agriculture, fisheries, and economic development.
At a national and international level, dissemination will occur through the following channels:
International Workshop on Agritourism is a three-day event held biennially that attracts agritourism operators, service providers, and educators. The 2022 event in Vermont attracted 500 representatives from 56 countries, including developing economies and underserved communities. Project results will be shared through a conference presentation and/or poster session.
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal that focuses on applied research in agriculture and food systems. Established in 2010, the journal is an open-source publication available free online with an impact factor of 3.7.
Journal of Marketing Research is a bimonthly peer-reviewed journal that focuses on scholarly contributions to marketing methods. Established in 1964, it has an impact factor of 6.1.
National Extension Tourism Network Conference is a biennial event that attracts hundreds of agents for Cooperative Extension and Sea grant working in tourism and outdoor recreation. Project results will be shared through a conference presentation and/or poster session.