Millennials and chocolate product ethics: Saying one thing and doing another

Because of changes in contemporary American culture, attitudes toward certain product characteristics like clean labels, certified ethical sourcing, and sugar/fat content seem to be changing, especially among Millennials. The present project focused on Millennials' judgment of the importance of various product characteristics in their choice of chocolate confections. After a series of focus groups to inform the design, an experiment was conducted in which participants made a series of choices between product characteristics. The choice data were subjected to a cluster analysis to identify subgroups of consumer preferences and then subjected to multidimensional scaling to visualize the preference space. Most participants showed little discriminability among factors like organic, certified ethical sourcing, and rainforest friendly, a strong preference for clean labels, and more concern about high levels of fat rather than sugar in their chocolate confections. For most participants, their choice behavior reflected minimal concern for ethical factors whereas their public declarations in a focus group suggested otherwise.