The 2011 ASHS Annual Conference

Traditionally, Canadian producers and marketers use terms such as biocontrol, integrated pest management (IPM), organic, and sustainable to describe how their product was produced in order to elicit acceptance or premiums of their products.  However, little if any attention has been paid to understanding what message this sends to consumers. This study specifically examines what Canadian consumers perceive biocontrol, IPM, organic, and sustainable to be. Results indicated that, as expected, almost all of respondents had heard of the term “organic,” with a large percentage having heard of “sustainable.”  In regard to IPM and biocontrol, considerably fewer respondents had heard of these production methods. However, when taking a closer look at what consumers believed these production practices to be, the results indicate that consumers do not have a general consensus as to what producers and scientists typically mean by these production practices. For instance, even within the well advertised organic label, consumers perceive different things, which implies that consumers may not be getting what they are expecting. The miscommunication between the less heard of practices, i.e. biocontrol and IMP,  results in even less consensus among consumers with many consumers having a totally wrong perception of the practice. This study sheds light on what Canadian consumers perceive the production practices to be and compares these beliefs to what is typically meant.