Consumers’ Buying Groups in the Short Food Chains: Alternatives for Trust

Food markets in affluent countries tend to be characterized by increasing complexity under severalregards such as the organization of the productive chains, the process that leads to the formationof consumer’s preferences, the information/communication task and the building of trustamong stakeholders. In particular, consumers are increasingly concerned about many credenceattributes such as food safety, environmental concerns, the fairness of trade conditions, productorigin and so forth.The paper focus on short chains and consumers’ buying groups (CBGs) seen as strategies toovercome the emerging difficulties that consumers face in collecting and processing informationon credence attributes. The results of a field survey, based on e-mail interviews to ItalianCBGs’ members are presented. The survey had the aim to explore personal motivations to joina CBG, the groups’ main objectives and organization and, eventually, the degree of satisfactionwith this organization of the food shopping.The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 analyses the sources of consumer’s substantialdistrust on many of the products available on food markets and underlines that the most commonremedies to market failures due to asymmetric information, undertaken both by producersand policy makers, are far to be fully effective. Section 3 is devoted to short chains, directly connectingproducers to consumers, and CBGs, i.e. families that organize their shopping on a collectivebasis to better pursue their ethical goals and to gain organizational advantages. Bothweakness and strength points of short chains and of CBGs are briefly discussed from the consumers’as well as from the producers’ point of view. The results of the interviews are analysedin the fourth section while some concluding remarks are contained in the last section.