Beef Consumers Behaviour and Preferences—The Case of Portugal

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The review of the manuscript entitled „Beef sustainable consumer choice – the case of a Portuguese autochthonous bovine breed” - Sustainability-1562744

The manuscript submitted for the review is written at an average level. There are methodological errors and serious deficiencies in the text. The manuscript has not been composed well and thus is inconsistent with the title. That is why, in my opinion, corrections should be made. Some of my suggestions are listed below.

1. The title of the manuscript – should be changed because it is not adequate to the scope of the research actually performed. The results of the survey (described in the methodology) refer only to the assessment of consumer behaviour and preferences on the Portuguese beef market. The elements of the meat origin analysis - breed / sustainable (organic) production method, can be found in the chapter "Discussion" - literature [52].
2. Abstract – should be improved. It should contain the subject of the research, the actual aim and the results / conclusions of the survey research obtained.The content of the abstract must be both consistent with the content of the indicated parts of the work (e.g. aim of research) and unambiguous (instead of a "sustainable alternative" (line 17) should be "choice of meat from the Portuguese autochthonous bovine breed").There are no specific conclusions regarding the aim and title of the work.The last two sentences are recommendations based on the discussion.
3. Key words: should be changed and adapted to the content of the work. g. "beef", "Portuguese consumer", "consumer preferences", "sustainable production", "cattle breed ... ..". They should make the article easier to find and thus broaden its citation.
4. Introduction – it should be completed and corrected. A final part of this chapter should be related to the alternative (sustainable) method of meat production from "Portuguese autochthonous bovine breed" and problems associated with it (partially described in the “Discussion” chapter), in order to correctly formulate and justify the aim of the research. And thus, the current form of the introduction could be abbreviated.
5. The aim of the research - should be verified. It is formulated too generally at the end of the “Introduction”, while in the abstract it is much more detailed (but still not very adequate to the research carried out). The description of the sustainable production method of cattle breed …… should be described in detail in chapter 2 “Material and methods”, and not in the aim of research.
6. Research material and methodology - the methodological assumptions are incorrect, so the inference is groundless. It is necessary to verify the number of respondents and re-analyze their answers. The consumer survey carried out on a sample of 491 respondents is a fairly small and unrepresentative to determine the preferences of consumers from the whole country. The selection of the research sample was probably not fully thought out, especially since over half (54%) of the respondents were aged 18-31. What does "potential beef consumer" mean? The answer must be unambiguous - declaring consumption or not! Further on in the manuscript it can be found that 89.4% of the respondents consume beef (line 176), so how can the respondents – non-beef eaters (about 11% - line 180) express their opinions on their preferences and behaviour, let alone on "balanced choice ”(see title)?. What was the method of recruiting to the survey sample? From where and how were the respondents recruited? When was the research conducted?
7. Conclusions - this section should be entitled "Summary and Conclusions". However, this part of the work lacks specific conclusions from the conducted research, which should be a response to a correctly formulated aim.
8. Figure 4 – I consider to be incorrect qualifying "product origin" to the (internal) quality attributes, such as freshness, taste / flavour, "texture" and "juiciness".
9. Errors in the wording: instead of "quality cues" internal and external - it should be "quality attributes"; "meat consumption harms the environment" should be replaced with "meat production affects ……."

Author Response

Thank you for the suggestions, and we hope that the changes made were according to the expectations.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thanks for the opportunity to read your manuscript. The topic is particularly interesting and the manuscript provides an alternative perspective, compared to extant literature. Despite the simplicity of the survey, the results are interesting.

I have two main recommendations:

 - please make your final sections stronger. "Discussion" should be a dialogue with extant literature. And as experts on the topic, it is very important that your views on managerial implications and on avenues for future research are as detailed as possible. Please also carefully consider the limitations of your study.

 

 - some figures that simply present descriptive statistics (histograms) would be more convenient if presented in one single table. Obviously this is my personal opinion, but I do feel that figures 3 to 7 should be removed and replaced by one table.

 

Additionally, please provide clear detail about your method on the abstract and introduction (e.g., sample dimension, where/when the study was conducted). 

 

The citations are not always correct, please check again the rules for this journal. One aspect that needs to be checked is that sometimes you need the name of the author. For instance, not Adapted from [5], but instead adapted from Smith [5].

It would also be nice to see more recent articles specially from the Sustainability journal cited in the article, in order to foster dialogue between scholars, and demonstrate that this conversation is up-to-date. 

 

I wish all the best to the authors and their research.

 

 

 

 

Author Response

Thank you for the suggestions, and we hope the changes made were accordingly to the reviewer expectations

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors

The reviewer's comments were taken into account. The article looks much better now.

I recommend the work to be published in this journal.