UK Consumers Want More Organic Everything

The Soil Association has reported  on how current consumer trends in health and sustainability are rapidly driving the organic sector in the UK — almost £45 million a week is spent on organic products. The newly released 2019 Organic Market report demonstrates how products branded as organic are becoming the go-to products for the healthy, the environmental and the socially conscious.

The last decade has seen a huge increase in the demand for more ethical and environmentally friendly food options such as free range chicken and eggs due to concerns over chicken welfare in captivity. Now, consumer awareness is extending even further. Customers are now much more aware of the practice of chick culling for instance, where male chicks are routinely killed upon hatching because they can’t lay eggs and it isn’t economically viable to look after them until they are old enough to eat. There are obvious consumer knock-on effects — the first no-kill eggs have just gone on the market in Germany through a process which identifies the sex of the egg before hatching, meaning that only female hens are allowed to hatch to rear chicks.

Whilst many products guarantee animal welfare standards, they do not necessarily need to be organic. The Soil Association, which certifies 70% of all organic products in the UK, claims however, that people are veering towards organic standards as the marker for a large array of consumption issues which concern them, not just whether something has been produced organically, by using fewer pesticides and not adding any artificial additives or chemicals.

Now consumers increasingly look to the organic label as an arbiter of standards of other issues, such as where the product originated, whether living creatures were harmed in its making, whether the process caused other detrimental environmental impacts and so forth. Organic products tie in with environmentally conscious decisions because they tend to use less packaging and plastic, which the report also highlights as an increasing concern for shoppers.

Another main driver is health, with many UK consumers trying out different diets like cutting down on meat say, or becoming a pescatarian (someone who doesn’t eat meat but does eat fish) or a flexitarian (a person who eats mostly plant-based food but occasionally eats fish or meat).he Soil Association has reported this week on how current consumer trends in health and sustainability are rapidly driving the organic sector in the UK — almost £45 million a week is spent on organic products. The newly released 2019 Organic Market report demonstrates how products branded as organic are becoming the go-to products for the healthy, the environmental and the socially conscious.

Source: Soil Association Uk
https://www.soilassociation.org/