Traceability systems can provide detailed information about the origin, processing, transfer and distribution of a food item. The information reported on the labels can be considered as an instrument to improve consumer trust and perception of food safety and quality. However, if too much information is provided, information overloads may occur, causing consumers to spend too much time on information processing. Thus, it is important to understand which kind of information that consumers are really interested in. Based on three criteria, namely food safety , food quality and food trust, this study investigates consumer preferences for information on traceability systems used in Taiwan?s pork sector. Since there is interdependence among the three criteria. This study adopts a hybrid of Analytic Network Process (ANP) and Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) method to conduct the multi-criteria evaluation. This study first extracts 17 attributes of traceability information from previous literature and then measures the relative weights (consumer preferences) of the attributes using a system of pairwise comparison. Results indicate that national certification, certification marks, retailer, date of slaughter and date of packaging are attributes of traceability information that consumers are more concerned about when purchasing pork products. The findings of this research can be a reference for the government and related industries on how to strengthen the usefulness of the current pork traceability system.
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