THE SUSTAINABILITY IMPLICATIONS OF EU QUALITY SCHEMES - A LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine consumer insight and understanding towards the sustainability of agro-food products certified with EU quality schemes from the perspective of the three pillars: environmental, social, and economic. This review paper is based on analyzing the specialized literature through a search method. Using a predefined set of keywords, a search was conducted in the leading scientific databases, such as Web of Science (WOS), Google Scholar, and Scopus. The findings reveal that EU-certified food products have been awarded by consumers an impressive score in terms of environmental, social, and economic roles, the agricultural products certified with EU quality schemes being highly regarded from all three viewpoints. This review will benefit as an outset for actors such as farmers, retailers, and authorities to implement consumer information campaigns to assist them in making correct and healthy choices regarding food purchases. This study may have some limitations. The sustainability of products labelled with EU quality schemes is delivered from the consumers' perspective. As future research directions, the sustainability of such products could be examined from the perspective of some technological indicators, such as price, carbon footprint, water footprint, employment ratio and others.