SCHOOL MILK DEMAND – INTERACTION BETWEEN POLICY AND OTHER FACTORS: SOME PRELIMINARY FINDINGS OF A REGIONAL PROJECT

Given the recent steadily declining consumption of school milk in Germany, aresearch project was set up by the German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection, in affiliation with other institutions, to retrieve quantifiable information on the different influencing factors and to provide approaches for improving the school milk demand.Main objectives are to evaluate impacts of factors like price, attitudes and habits (especially consumption habits), social background, gender, economic situation, knowledge, product range and distribution form, as well as of nutritional education measures. Primary schools in NorthRhine Westphalia were selected by stratified random sampling. Price impacts are derived by an experiment in which the price of school milk was reduced stepwise during the school year 2008/09, and increased over the school year 2009/10, while quantities of demand were reported regularly – either for individuals or on class level - for the selected schools. Almost all other information/data is captured by questionnaires given to pupils, parents, class teachers, school principals, school milk managers, and delivery firms. Preliminary results of a multilevelanalysis based on a subset of already available data indicate that the demand on the class level is influenced by girls’ share, migrants’ share, class year, class size, attitude of school principal,municipal size, and last but not least the price.