“For More Diversity, Better Taste and My Own Health” Exploring Organic Consumers’ Purchasing Motives for Heirloom Vegetable Varieties

Agrobiodiversity is the foundation of our ecosystems and food supply. However, agrobiodiversity is declining rapidly. A prominent strategy to safeguard endangered varieties, an important component of agrobiodiversity, is their cultivation and preservation in their natural environments. In order to make the cultivation of these varieties attractive to farmers, a functioning value chain and communication concepts for these goods have to be developed. Using heirloom vegetable varieties as an example, we examine existing communication approaches for endangered varieties and evaluate their suitability to transport their added value to organic consumers. We furthermore examine organic consumers’ purchasing motives to buy heirloom vegetable varieties. We collected data in three focus group discussions in Berlin (Germany) in 2018. This exploratory study shows that existing communication approaches for heirloom vegetable varieties strongly appeal to altruistic and biospheric purchasing motives. However, our results suggest that egoistic and hedonic purchasing motives are just as important to organic consumers. Hence, existing communication approaches for heirloom vegetable varieties, including the “Red List of Endangered Local Crops”, are not entirely suitable to communicate the added value of biodiversity-enhancing products to consumers. Based on these results, we will develop a holistic communication scheme for heirloom vegetable varieties for organic supermarkets and further distribution channels in Germany.