Boosting Demand for Biofortified Foods: The Case of Orange Fleshed Sweet Potato Bread in Tamale, Ghana

Abstract: In the context of introducing biofortification of staple crops as a food-based approach to combat micronutrient malnutrition in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA), we carried out a survey in Tamale, Ghana to elicit consumers’ preference of and willingness to pay for one of the highly nutritious biofortified staple crop processed product: the Orange Fleshed Sweet Potato (OFSP) bread. Our results indicate that scores of respondents in the sample show preference for OFSP bread. The most important determinants of OFSP bread preference are its sweet taste and soft texture and consumers are willing to pay 0.634 pesewas more for the attribute sweet, 0.204 pesewas more for the attribute soft and 0.265 pesewas more for the attribute yellow on top of the going price of same roll size of normal wheat bread, 50 pesewas. We also investigated the effect of prior knowledge on nutrition and health-enhancing properties of OFSP on consumer choice. We find that consumers with prior knowledge of OFSP were more likely to choose OFSP bread. These findings have multiple implications for OFSP growers, for bakers who are trying to create value-added products to maximize revenue, and for the International Potato Center to restructure scaling up efforts