Best-Worst Scaling of Food Values

Best-worst scaling of food values measures how much consumers care about a fixed set of food attributes — safety, price, taste, nutrition, naturalness, origin, environmental impact, fairness, and so on — by repeatedly asking them to pick the most and least important value from small subsets. Jayson Lusk and Brian Briggeman's 2009 article 'Food Values' introduced this specific application, adapting the best-worst (maximum-difference) scaling method that Finn and Louviere pioneered for food-safety research. Rather than rating each value on a 1-to-5 scale, where everything tends to look important, respondents are forced to trade values off against one another, yielding a discriminating, interval-scaled ranking of what truly drives their food choices and avoiding the scale-use biases that plague conventional importance ratings.