The thin line between tradition and well-being: consumer responds to health and typicality attributes for dry-cured ham

This study aims to evaluate consumers’ attitude towards the geographical indication as a typicality proxy and healthy attributes of dry-cured ham. For these purposes, a survey was carried out in Sicily to evaluate the role of protected designation of origin (PDO), salt content, and presence/absence of nitrites. A ranking conjoint experiment based on the linear assumption used. Following the conjoint analysis, a cluster analysis using Ward’s method has been carried out to explore the differences among different consumer groups in terms of utility and mean relative importance of various attributes. We found the existence of a clearly defined hierarchical order in consumer preferences for the attributes of dry-cured ham. The absence of nitrites was considered to be the most important attribute by respondents, followed by price. Furthermore, thanks to the clustering approach, our study observed how the importance of socio-demographic characteristics is differently interrelated with the specific attributes and attribute levels of dry-cured ham. The results provided by this paper could be useful in helping producers and marketers to segment the products and to identify strategies and actions to translate these results into concrete and shared production policies.