Food consumption, European Union, market convergence, North America, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Traill, W. Bruce

English

Research Papers in Economics

PART THREE:  Are Food Marketing
Systems in North America and the
European Union Converging?
11.  Convergence in U.S. and E.U. Food
Systems?  The Case of Food Consumption
Bruce Traill
Strategy and Policy in the Food System:
Emerging Issues
EDITED BY
Julie A. Caswell and Ronald W. Cotterill
Proceedings of NE-165 Conference
June 20-21, 1996
Washington, D.C.
© 1997
Food Marketing Policy Center
Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
University of Connecticut
and
Department of Resource Economics
University of Massachusetts, AmherstConvergence in U.S. and E.U. Food Systems?
The Case of Food Consumption
Bruce Traill  (w.b.traill@reading.ac.uk)
Department of Agricultural Economics and Management
University of Reading
4 Earley Gate
Whiteknights Road
Reading, UK  RG6 2AR
Keywords: Food consumption, market convergence, European Union,
North America
Copyright © 1997 by Food Marketing Policy Center, University of Connecticut.  All rights
reserved.  Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by
any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.141
11
Convergence in U.S. and E.U. Food Systems?
The Case of Food Consumption
Bruce Traill1
Introduction
This short paper considers just one aspect of the convergence debate, that relating to food
consumption.  Although the main purpose of this session is to consider convergence between the U.S.
and E.U., the focus in this paper is mainly on the E.U. and the paper asks whether food consumption
patterns in Europe are converging and what might be the final state of any convergence process.
The issue of convergence is of evident importance to providers of goods and services.  The more
alike markets are, the more alike can be the marketing mix which firms use to target those markets; no
need for costly product modifications to satisfy local tastes; no need to develop different advertising/
promotion strategies; no need to develop products suitable both for the corner shop and the hypermarket;
and no need to price differently in each market to reflect consumers’ perception of the positioning of the
product in the luxury/basic spectrum.  Stated like this, the benefits to firms of convergence appear
unequivocal, but it should be kept in mind that differing demand characteristics (as well as the ability
to separate markets) is a precondition for price discrimination, so firms with market power in a number
of markets may prefer that demand does not converge and that markets remain separated.
Evidence for Convergence
Connor (1991, 1994) argues that Europe is moving towards the U.S. in food consumption.  In the
earlier article (an NC-194 working paper:  Connor 1991: 2) he states his belief that “all consumers are
basically alike” in the sense that they “with the same incomes and socio-demographic characteristics,
facing the same relative prices, and holding the same information, will tend to choose the same basket
or array of goods.”   Thus, as incomes, prices, and demographic factors in Europe catch up with develop- 2
ments in North America, so food consumption patterns will converge.  Connor shows that for a range
of processed foods, European consumption correlates strongly with American consumption 5 and 10
years earlier, but not with consumption in the same time period.
The same logic applied within Europe predicts that as the European nations’ economies converge,
so will their food consumption patterns.  There is some evidence to support the view that convergence
has been taking place.  Using the broad product categories of FAO, Table 11.1 indicates the coefficient
of variation in consumption across 29 European countries in 1961 and 1990.  In all cases it is lower in
1990, implying that for all of these products, consumption has become more similar across European
countries during the last 30 years.  However, this is not to say that they have all become the same.
Hermann and Röder (1995) and Gil et al. (1995) apply different statistical methodologies to,142
TABLE 11.1  Coefficients of Variation of
Food Consumption Across 29 European
Countries (kgs per capita per year)
1961 1990
Alcohol
Cereals
Eggs
Fruit
Meat
Milk
Pulses
Starchy roots
Sugar
Vegetables
70
31.6
47.3
58.5
39.8
43.4
99.1
45
41.4
43.5
52.5
30.1
31.3
42.4
28.8
31.2
80.5
43.1
21.8
42.6
Source:  Computed from FAO food bal-
ance sheet data.
respectively, OECD and E.U. food consumption
data, in both cases concluding that convergence
is occurring, though in the latter case concluding
that the speed of convergence is diminishing.  Gil
et al. (1995) demonstrate that significant dietary
differences remain:  Using cluster analysis, they
identify 7 Western European country groupings:
Portugal and Spain; Greece and Italy; Benelux,
France, Ireland, and the U.K.; Austria, Germany,
and the Netherlands; Finland; Denmark; and Nor-
way and Sweden.
Culture and Individual Personality
Differences Matter 
One reason that food consumption patterns
should not be expected completely to converge
among countries even if socio-economic and
demographic factors do, is that culture is an
important influence on behavior and cultural
diversity has proved resistant to the pressures
from foreign travel, global media, and telecommunications.  Another is that individuals differ, both
within and between countries, and that individual personal characteristics are another determinant of food
consumption (see, e.g., Steenkamp 1996 for a general discussion of these issues).  Different individuals
have different “values” and, though psychologists may disagree about precisely how many fundamental
values there are, they accept that different people place different emphasis on different values.  For
example, Hofstede (1984), uses four dimensions to categorize personality, (i) individualism vs.
collectivism (importance attached to individual freedoms vs. society), (ii) power distance (tolerance of
inequality in wealth and power/centralization of authority), (iii) risk (the extent to which risk is avoided
through laws, rules, religion), and (iv) masculinity vs. femininity (emphasis placed on masculine values
of performance, aggression, visible achievement).  In a study based on questionnaires with 116,000 IBM
employees world-wide, the responses were used to group similar countries.  Some of the groups are
shown in Table 11.2:  The Anglo-American group consists of  the U.S., U.K. Australia, New Zealand,
Ireland, and South Africa; the Nordic group has all the Scandinavian countries; the Germanic includes
Germany,  Austria, and Switzerland; the Latin-European contains France, Spain, Italy, Portugal,
Belgium, and Latin America.  These country groupings are intuitively more logical than those obtained
by clustering according to economic and demographic variables (e.g., Krause et al. 1995, which puts the
U.S., Japan, and Sweden in the same cluster).
Country groupings themselves however represent only an average of their populations, whereas any
businessman or marketing academic will testify to the fact that food markets within individual developed
Western countries are becoming more finely segmented (e.g., Hughes 1994; Barkema et al. 1993) and
the trend is very firmly away from mass markets.  Recognizing that consumers within countries are not
all the same, the most sensible approach is to understand consumer markets as “groups of buyers that
share the need and desire for a product and the ability to pay for it rather than those who share a common
border.  Buyers in a segment seek similar benefits from and exhibit similar behavior in buying a product”
(Blackwell et al. 1994: 221).  According to this approach, demographic and economic considerations
remain important, but so do psychosometric, attitudinal, cultural, and lifestyle characteristics, and the
process of convergence is best viewed as the growing importance of homogeneous segments of con-143
TABLE 11.2  Characteristics of Country Groupings
Group Power Distance Avoidance Individualism Masculinity
Uncertainty
Anglo-American LL LL HH H
Nordic LL H L L
Germanic LL HH HH H
Latin-European H HH H L
Japan H HH LL HH
Far East HH L L M
LL = Very Low, L = Low, M = Medium, H = High, HH = Very High.
Source:  Adapted from Hofstede 1984.
sumers which cross national boundaries.  Sometimes such groupings are known in the international
marketing literature as strategically equivalent segments because they respond to the same marketing
mix.
The nearest that exists so far to a tool for cross-country segmentation along these lines for food
consumption is the “food-related lifestyles” work of Grunert et al. (1993) which clusters consumers
according to characteristics associated with their attitudes to food and their behavior towards food, in
terms of shopping and eating (which of course are related to economic and demographic as well as
cultural and psychosometric characteristics).  Thus far the work has concentrated mainly on the
validation of the instrument for cross-cultural analysis (i.e., do consumers in different cultures interpret
the questions in the same way? (Grunert et al. 1993)) and its application to separately develop food
related life-style segments in three countries, Germany, France, and U.K. (e.g., Grunert et al. 1995), but
not in detail to the search for cross-country segments.  However, as Table 11.3 indicates, efforts to look
at trans-national segments for these countries has begun.
Another study funded by the European Union is underway, using somewhat different methodology
(Laddering, via Means-End Chains; see Steenkamp et al. 1995) based on consumer interviews in 11 E.U.
states.  At the end of that study we will know more about the extent of cross-European market segments,
TABLE 11.3  Food-Related Life Style Segments in Three Countries
Segment Germany France Great Britain
The uninvolved food consumer 21% 18% 9%
The careless food consumer 11% 27%
The moderate food consumer 16%
The conservative food consumer 18% 13% 19%
The rational food consumer 26% 35% 33%
The hedonistic food consumer 18%
The adventurous food consumer 24% 12%
Source:  Grunert et al. 1996.144
though there remains one problem even if such segments are “uncovered”:  Do such methods of
segmentation provide good predictions of food consumption?  The suspicion remains that similar food-
related lifestyles in different countries could lead to different food consumption.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the evidence for either globalization or Europeanization of food consumption is rather
limited.  There clearly are forces at work, as described by Connor (1994), which tend to encourage
convergence in consumption.  There is evidence that this is happening within Europe.  However, it is
simplistic to assume that all consumers are basically the same.  Even within countries marketers have
long used psychosometric as well as economic and demographic variables to segment markets.  Between
countries, cultural differences magnify these effects, though there are signs that some global segments
of consumers are emerging.  Ongoing research should shed light on whether trans-European segments
of consumers already exist, and the economic, demographic, and other characteristics of those segments
should be useful in deducing the extent to which they are likely to become more important over time
and/or can be targeted by firms as strategically equivalent segments.
Notes
Centre for Food Economics Research (CeFER), Department of Agricultural and Food Economics, 1
The University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AR, U.K.
This somewhat controversial statement had been expunged by the time the article emerged in 2
journal form (Connor 1994).
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CONVERGENCE IN U.S. AND E.U. FOOD SYSTEMS? THE CASE OF FOOD CONSUMPTION

CONVERGENCE IN U.S. AND E.U. FOOD SYSTEMS? THE CASE OF FOOD CONSUMPTION

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