Food Policy 112 (2022) 102346

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Food Policy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/foodpol

Marketing fortified rice: Effects of aspirational messaging and association

with free distribution
Reajul Chowdhury a, *, Benjamin Crost b, Vivian Hoffmann c, d
a
Amazon, Seattle, USA
b
Department of Economics, University of Calgary, Canada
c
International Food Policy Research Institute, USA
d
School of Public Policy and Administration and Department of Economics, Carleton University, Canada

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Fortification of staple foods is among the most cost-effective public health interventions. In settings where
Aspirational messaging mandatory fortification is not feasible, providing fortified foods through public safety net programs and building
Willingness-to-pay private demand can be implemented in parallel to maximize coverage. However, little is known about what
Adoption
marketing messages are most effective at increasing the demand for fortified foods. Further, as governments scale
Reference price effects
Fortification
up fortification of foods distributed through safety net programs, understanding the effect of knowledge about
this on consumer demand will be important for crafting communication strategies. Drawing on insights from the
literature on marketing and consumer behavior, we hypothesize that a message linking fortified rice, an unfa­
miliar product in this setting, to a known, aspirational product, can increase demand. We test the individual and
joint impacts of an aspirational marketing message and information about the public distribution of fortified rice
through a framed field experiment eliciting willingness to pay for rice fortified with six micronutrients in
Chandpur District, Bangladesh. We find that a message which combines aspirational positioning and information
on public distribution increases the proportion of participants willing to pay a premium at least equal to the cost
of fortification by 19 percentage points. The results suggest that any negative impact on willingness to pay
associated with free distribution is outweighed by the credibility distribution lends to health claims about the
product.

1. Introduction As fortification of rice remains voluntary in most contexts, under­

Micronutrient deficiency or ‘hidden hunger’ affects more than 2
billion people worldwide (von Grebmer et al., 2017). Fortification of
staple foods with vitamins and minerals is considered the most cost-
effective way to address population-level micronutrient deficiency,
and has repeatedly been ranked by a global panel of experts as among
the top three solutions to advance global welfare, in terms of costs versus
benefits (Copenhagen Consensus, 2012, 2008). Fortification of rice – the
main staple food in Asia and the source of 80 percent of calories for the
population there living in poverty – is considered a cost-effective and
sustainable solution to reduce the micronutrient deficiency in the region
(Harding et al., 2018). However, as of 2017, only seven countries
globally mandate rice fortification through legislation (Mkambula et al.,
2020).
standing how to build consumer demand for fortified rice is critical to
realizing the potential impact of this technology. While the literature on
consumer willingness to pay for fortified foods shows the importance of
providing nutritional information, evidence on the impact of comple­
mentary marketing messages is thin and inconclusive (Birol et al., 2015).
This paper attempts to address this gap in the literature by offering
answers to two questions: can the demand for fortified rice be increased
by positioning it as an aspirational health product, and how does asso­
ciating the rice with a social safety net program affect demand.
In particular, we tested the effect of two messages on demand, as
measured through an experimental auction procedure, for fortified rice
in a highly vulnerable population in rural Bangladesh. Drawing on the
marketing literature, the first message was designed to facilitate con­
sumers’ understanding of and demand for fortified rice, an unfamiliar

* Corresponding author at: Department of Agriculture and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 405 Mumford Hall, Urbana, IL 61801,
USA.
E-mail addresses: reajul.alamchy@gmail.com, mac7@illinois.edu (R. Chowdhury).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2022.102346
Received 10 February 2021; Received in revised form 17 August 2022; Accepted 23 August 2022
Available online 10 September 2022
0306-9192/© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).
R. Chowdhury et al.
concept in this population, by linking it to a known, aspirational prod­
uct: a fortified nutritional drink. Several studies have argued that con­
sumer learning about unfamiliar products can be facilitated through the
use of analogies to an existing and familiar product set (Kuijken et al.,
2017; Gregan-Paxton and Moreau, 2003; Hoeffler, 2003; Moreau et al.,
2001; Gregan-Paxton and John, 1997). Drawing analogies to a high-
value product can influence consumers’ monetary value assessment of
a product (Kuijken et al., 2017) while also tapping into their aspirations.
A recent review found significant aspirational consumption among so-
called “base of the pyramid” (BoP) consumers living on between 2 and
8 USD per day (Srivastava et al., 2020), and a survey of marketing
practitioners targeting this population identified the use of aspirational
messages – messages positioning a product as something the consumer
would wish to use but may not currently able to – as a common approach
(Beninger and Robson, 2015). However, the impact of aspirational
product positioning on demand has not, to our knowledge, been tested
experimentally in a low and middle-income country (LMIC) setting.
The second message informed consumers about the distribution of
fortified rice through a major public safety net program in Bangladesh.
Provision of fortified foods to vulnerable populations is a core strategy
used by the Government of Bangladesh and other governments in the
region to address malnutrition (Department of Food & Public Distribu­
tion, Government of India, 2021; Andrade et al., 2021). This fact is at
odds with, and could potentially erode the effect of, aspirational posi­
tioning of fortified foods by positioning this as food ‘for the poor’ – a
perception explicitly avoided by a social marketing campaign for forti­
fied rice in Brazil, even though it targeted low-income consumers
(Milani et al., 2017). In addition to contradicting aspirational product
positioning, the free distribution could be interpreted by consumers as a
signal of low product quality (Darke and Chung, 2005) or lead to a low
anchoring of consumers’ price expectations (Kőszegi and Rabin, 2006).
On the other hand, public distribution of fortified foods could signal
government endorsement and thus confer the importance of fortifica­
tion, perhaps by bolstering the credibility of claims about its health
benefits. Neither participants in the experiment, nor their social con­
nections, were likely to have had prior experience of the health benefits
of consuming fortified rice, making it a credence good from their
perspective. Previous literature suggests that consumers tend to rely on
external cues such as brand name, price, or third party endorsements as
signals of the credibility of claims made about credence goods (Bloom
and Pailin, 1995; Zeithaml, 1988).
In the remainder of this section, we provide a brief overview of op­
tions for addressing micronutrient malnutrition and the advantages and
disadvantages of each of these. We then review the literature on con­
sumer acceptance and willingness to pay for fortified foods. Finally, we
describe the contribution of this paper in the context of related
literature.
1.1. Options for addressing micronutrient deficiencies
Micronutrient malnutrition can be addressed by improving dietary
diversity, by supplementing the diet with concentrated doses of micro­
nutrients, or through mass fortification of staple foods or regularly
consumed condiments. Mass fortification can be achieved either through
biofortification, which improves the bioavailability of micronutrients
through agronomic practices, traditional plant breeding, or genetic
modification (GM), or through industrial fortification, which entails
adding a fortificant during post-harvest processing.
Both biofortification and industrial fortification have strong poten­
tial to improve nutritional outcomes in Bangladesh (Ara et al., 2019; De
Moura et al., 2016), and each has advantages and disadvantages. A
major advantage of biofortification is that it can reach populations that
rely on unprocessed grain, including those who produce the food they
consume. Further, the recurrent costs of biofortified varieties are
generally no higher than those of their non-fortified analogs (Olson
et al., 2021). Adoption thus can increase rapidly in contexts where
2
Food Policy 112 (2022) 102346
farmers perceive an advantage to biofortified varieties (Vaiknoras et al.,
2019). In Bangladesh, a recent study found that consumer acceptance of
bio-fortified rice was high and that information on its nutritional qual­
ities increased willingness to pay by 4.6 percent (Herrington et al.,
2021). According to HarvestPlus estimates, 13 percent of all rice-
farming households were growing zinc biofortified rice in 2020 (Har­
vestPlus, 2021, as cited by Herrington et al., 2021).
A disadvantage of biofortification based on conventional breeding
techniques is that these varieties tend to target a single micronutrient,
and may not reach the concentration required to reach the recom­
mended daily intake based on typical consumption patterns (Van Der
Straeten et al., 2020). The biofortified rice varieties available in
Bangladesh only have elevated levels of zinc, just one of the six micro­
nutrients included in a typical industrial rice fortificant (Andrade et al.,
2021).1 While it may be feasible to engineer crops with a stronger
micronutrient profile (Van Der Straeten et al., 2020), GM technologies
face strict regulatory control based on potential ecological and health
risks (Jeon et al., 2021; Kok et al., 2018). At the time of writing, only one
country, the Philippines, had approved planting a GM bio-fortified crop,
Golden Rice.2
While industrial fortification is able to provide a larger number of
micronutrients at greater concentration, and typically faces fewer reg­
ulatory hurdles than biofortification, constraints in manufacturing ca­
pacity, quality control, and poor enforcement of regulatory standards
limit the reach and quality of fortified foods in many low and middle-
income countries (Olson et al., 2021). Also, because fortification re­
quires an additional input (fortificant) and specialized machinery to
blend this into the fortified food, it entails a cost, which consumers may
not be willing to bear. In settings where mandatory fortification is not
feasible, designing effective social marketing strategies to promote de­
mand for fortified foods is thus critical.
1.2. Consumer demand for fortification
While mandating fortification of staples through legislation is the
primary strategy for increasing consumption of fortified foods, a
voluntary fortification combined with social marketing has been used in
some settings (Milani et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2009). The market
penetration, and resulting public health impact, of voluntarily fortified
foods varies widely (Lalani et al., 2019).
Previous studies estimating consumer willingness to pay for either
industrially or biofortified staples in low-income settings through
incentivized experimental auctions and choice experiments have found
substantial premiums for fortification (Chowdhury et al., 2011; De
Groote et al., 2011). Experimenter demand effects or social desirability
bias may influence these estimates, and more recent work showing a
decay in the effect of a health-related label on consumer food choice
over time (Hoffmann et al., 2021) implies that fortification premiums
estimated in this way – including through the present study – should be
interpreted with caution. In contrast, we estimate the effect of alterna­
tive marketing messages by comparing WTP among consumers who bid
on a fortified product, differencing out any overall bias associated with
fortification.
A rapidly growing experimental literature evaluates social marketing
strategies to build consumer demand for biofortified crop varieties. Ef­
fects on demand of varying different aspects of the information provided
to consumers, including content (nutrition benefits), framing (gains of
consumption vs losses from non-consumption), medium (radio vs com­
munity leaders), length (short vs detailed), and frequency, have been
tested. Pre-publication versions of several of these studies are reviewed
by Birol et al. (2015). The impact of providing nutrition information on
1
These are: vitamin-A, thiamin (B1), cobalamin (B-12), folic acid (B-9), iron
and zinc.
2
https://www.goldenrice.org/.
R. Chowdhury et al.
the willingness to pay is consistently strong and positive across studies.
The source of this information is not important (Meenakshi et al., 2012),
nor is the level of detail (Birol et al., 2015), but message repetition does
increase demand (Oparinde et al., 2019). Results on the source of cer­
tification or planting material are mixed, with consumers preferring
international (versus state-level) certification in one context (Banerji
et al., 2016), but no impact on demand of the source of planting material
(national government versus an international authority) in another
(Oparinde et al., 2016). Varying the framing of the effect of fortification
by using a gain (benefits of consumption) versus loss (harms of non-
consumption) orientation had no effect on demand (Oparinde et al.,
2019).
1.3. Contribution
We make two contributions to the existing literature. First, we pre­
sent new evidence on the effect of aspirational messaging in stimulating
demand for a health good. To our knowledge, the effect of aspirational
messages on consumer acceptance of or demand for fortified foods – or
indeed other preventive health products – has not previously been
studied experimentally, despite evidence that low-income populations
engage in significant aspirational consumption and that marketers tar­
geting these populations often use aspirational marketing strategies.
While the literature on the promotion of demand for biofortified foods is
growing, effective marketing messages beyond the description of
nutritional benefits of these foods have not been clearly identified. We
thus fill a gap in the literature on how to stimulate demand for fortified
foods, and for preventive health products more generally.
Second, we address how knowledge about the free distribution of a
health product to targeted groups interacts with efforts to market it more
broadly. Previous studies have examined the effect of free distribution
on subsequent demand among those to whom goods were provided and
their social contacts (Bensch and Peters, 2020; Cohen and Dupas, 2010;
Omotilewa et al., 2019). In these studies, the impact of free distribution
on demand is interpreted as the combined effect of learning through
direct or observed experience with the good, and that of anchoring
consumer expectations on a reference price of zero. The evidence we
present differs from these studies in that participants informed that
fortified rice is distributed through a safety net program elsewhere in the
country do not observe the benefits of consuming this rice. We thus
interpret the effect of this information as arising from the combination of
a credibility cue and a reference price effect.
2. Study setting
Approximately half of the Bangladeshi children under five years of
age (U-5), and 11 percent of school-aged children suffered from anemia
as of 2013, the most recent year for which nationally representative
micronutrient deficiency data are available (Khan et al. 2016, UNICEF
2013). More recent statistics indicate that the nutritional status of
Bangladeshi children remains poor, with 31 percent of U-5 children
stunted (short for their age) (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and
Bangladesh, 2020). Anemia, to which iron deficiency is a major
contributor, is one of the leading causes of pregnancy-related compli­
cations and maternal mortality in the country, with approximately 50
percent of reproductive-age women classified as anemic (UNICEF 2013).
Zinc deficiency is also common, affecting 45 percent of U-5 children and
66 percent of non-pregnant non-lactating women (National Institute of
Population Research and Training (NIPORT), Mitra and Associates, and
ICF International, 2016; UNICEF, 2013).
Rice is the main staple food in Bangladesh and accounts for 70
percent of caloric intake (Sayeed and Yunus 2018), with an average
daily per capita consumption at 426 g (Yunus et al. 2019). Fortified rice
is not currently marketed in Bangladesh, and the low manufacturing
capacity for fortified kernels precludes mandatory fortification. Instead,
the government has taken a more targeted approach, distributing rice
3
Food Policy 112 (2022) 102346
fortified with vitamin A, vitamin B1, vitamin B12, folic acid, iron, and
zinc to ultra-poor households in selected pilot districts through the
Vulnerable Group Development program within the Public Food Dis­
tribution System (PFDS) since 2014. A recent study found that after 12
months, anemia prevalence among women in households receiving this
rice dropped by 11 percent, and zinc deficiency dropped by 6 percent
compared to those in non-beneficiary households (Ara et al. 2019). The
provision of fortified grains through the PFDS is set to expand, and
policymakers have expressed interest in making fortified rice available
through the private market as well.
Fortified rice in Bangladesh constitutes an ideal case for studying the
effect of an analogical aspirational message on consumer demand. First,
consumers in this setting generally, and in particular those in the study
sample, are unfamiliar with fortified rice. To our knowledge, the only
company to sell fortified rice in Bangladesh did so for just a few months
in 2017 before discontinuing the product due to lack of demand. During
this short time, the fortified brand was marketed as a premium product
in supermarkets frequented by relatively high-income consumers. Sec­
ond, rice is perceived as an essential staple rather than as a source of
nutrients. Thus, fortified rice does not align with typical conceptions
about the product category of rice. Finally, since rice is the main staple
in Bangladesh, the study population is familiar with the characteristics
and market price of unfortified rice and is, therefore, able to form a
meaningful assessment of the value of the fortified product.
The government’s dual strategy of distributing fortified rice through
a public safety net program while simultaneously encouraging the
development of a private market raises the questions of (1) how
knowledge of free distribution might affect consumer demand, and (2)
how this reaction mediates the effectiveness of a marketing strategy
based on aspirational product positioning.
3. Experimental and survey design
In this section, we describe study site selection, determination of
sample size, participant recruitment process, and data collection
methods.
3.1. Study site and population
We aimed to recruit a study population with a high potential to
benefit from the consumption of industrially fortified rice within
Bangladesh. This led us to draw from the functionally landless rural
population (defined by the Government as those who own<0.2 ha of
land). Prevalence of micronutrient deficiency is highest in rural areas
(Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Bangladesh, 2020), and
landlessness is an effective proxy for poverty (and thus vulnerability to
micronutrient deficiency) in rural Bangladesh, as evidenced by its use as
an eligibility criterion for rural safety net programs (Chowdhury et al.,
2020).
As resources did not allow for a more broadly representative study,
we selected a high-poverty district, Chandpur, in Chittagong Division,
which has the lowest per-capita rice production among the eight di­
visions in the country. Households in low rice production areas rely at
least partially on markets – as opposed to subsistence production – for
the rice they consume, and thus constitute a potential market for
industrially fortified rice. Within the Chittagong division, Chandpur has
the highest incidence of extreme poverty; 51 percent of households are
below the poverty line, and 30 percent are below the extreme poverty
line (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics 2017). By conducting the study in
this district, we purposively selected a population expected to have low
dietary diversity and thus high potential to benefit from the consump­
tion of fortified rice.
Four of the eight sub-districts in Chandpur district were excluded
from the sample due to urban or semi-urban classification (associated
with higher wealth status), flood risk (which could imply inaccessibility
during the study period), or involvement in other research activities.
R. Chowdhury et al.
From the remaining four sub-districts, namely Haziganj, Fairdganj,
Shahrasti, and Kachua, we randomly selected a total of ten unions for
inclusion in the study. The data collection (household survey and auc­
tion sessions) was conducted between July and early September of 2019.
To identify poor, landless households with a high probability of both
reliance on purchased rice and micronutrient deficiency, we selected the
sample from beneficiary lists of the Food Friendly Program (FFP).
Through this program, which is budgeted to cover 25 million individuals
(GoB SSPS 2020), functionally landless rural households are able to
purchase up to 30 kg of rice at 20–30 percent of the market price during
each of the five ‘lean season months’ (Chowdhury et al., 2020). This
subsidy is offered during March to April and September to November,
which does not overlap with the timing of the framed field experiment
(July to August). Participation in this program signifies food insecurity
as well as significant reliance on unsubsidized rice, as the quantity of
subsidized rice for which a household is eligible is low relative to total
annual consumption needs. Fortified rice is not currently available
through the FFP, and even if it were in the future, FFP beneficiaries
could benefit from purchasing fortified rice during months of the year
when the program is not active. We note that fortified rice had not, at the
time of the study, ever been distributed through the FFP.
Households that had received any free food transfer from the gov­
ernment in the last year were excluded due to the risk that receiving
another such transfer immediately prior to the experiment or expecting
to receive one shortly thereafter could affect their demand for rice.
Those who did not have at least one child aged between 0 and 16 years
were also excluded, as micronutrient fortification is especially beneficial
to the health of children, and the nutritional drink to which fortified rice
was compared in the aspirational treatment stresses the benefits to
children in its marketing. Finally, noting that approximately 15 percent
of FFP beneficiaries do not meet targeting criteria (Chowdhury et al.,
2020), to ensure a high risk of micronutrient malnutrition among the
subject pool and also their reliance on marketed rice, participants had to
satisfy at least two of the following five inclusion criteria, adopted from
program targeting criteria used by the Bangladeshi NGO BRAC: (1) the
household purchases rice from the market for at least four months of the
year; (2) an adult female household member sells labor; (3) the main
income earner is disabled; (4) a school-aged child sells labor at least
occasionally; (5) no household member has a regular salaried job. Only
3.5 percent of households screened were excluded from participation in
the study based on all these inclusion and exclusion criteria.
To ensure that participants had the authority to make food purchases
on behalf of the household, the male household head or another adult
male who usually buys groceries for the household was designated as the
primary respondent.
3.2. Sample size
The sample size for the experiment was set to achieve a minimum
detectable effect (MDE) in WTP of each marketing message against the
comparison group of 25 percent. This MDE is 26 percent lower than the
premium for biofortified rice estimated using a similar methodology
among low-income households in rural China (De Steur et al., 2012).
Type I and II error rates were set to the conventional levels of 5 percent
and 80 percent, respectively. Based on these parameters, the sample size
required was 245 households for each intervention group. For the binary
outcome of willingness to pay at least the cost of fortification, this
sample size implies an MDE of between 8.9 and 12.6 percentage points,
depending on the proportion in the comparison group.
Anticipating some attrition between recruitment and participation in
4
Food Policy 112 (2022) 102346
the auction sessions, the total targeted sample size for the four experi­
mental groups was set to 1,200(≈ 245 × 4 × 1.22), with 120 households
from each of the ten unions. A total of 1,203 households were surveyed.3
3.3. Survey
Upon recruitment into the study, respondents were administered a
structured, quantitative survey through a face-to-face interview. The
survey included questions regarding household income, expenditures,
land ownership, rice cultivation, rice consumption, and recent rice
purchases. The survey also included questions regarding household food
security and dietary diversity, which were administered to a female
household member responsible for food preparation.
Upon completion of the survey, the primary respondent was invited
to participate in an auction session to be held on a later date in a school
building within the community where he lived. Participants were not
informed about the purpose of the session but were informed about its
expected duration and that they would receive compensation of BDT
200 (USD 2.42) for attending,4 which is equivalent to the value of 3 h of
unskilled work at the local wage rate.5 No compensation was paid for the
completion of the household survey.6
3.4. Auction sessions and experimental treatments
Respondents in each union were randomly assigned to one of four
treatment arms: a comparison group was given information about
common micronutrient deficiencies and the health benefits of
consuming fortified rice (C); treatment group 1 (T-1), which in addition
was read an aspirational message using a premium nutritional drink mix
as an analog for fortified rice; treatment group 2 (T-2), which in addition
was read a message stating that fortified rice is distributed through the
Public Food Distribution System (PFDS) in particular districts, and
treatment group 3 (T-3), which received all three messages.7 In each
union, auction sessions for the four groups were held simultaneously in
3
Sample size by union: Chitoshi Purba 120, Dwadashgram 119, Dakkhin
Rupsha 122, Gandharbapur Dakkhin 119, Kalachon Uttar 120, Balithuba East
123, Purba Subidpur 125, Tamta Dakkhin 119, Tamta Uttar 119, and Uttar
Kachua 117.
4
Calculated using the official exchange rate of 1 USD = 82.78 BDT.
5
The literature on how participation incentives affect behavior in economic
studies is mixed. Clark (2002) suggests that such “house money” effects are not
significant in the context of experiments on contributions to public goods,
though Harrison (2007) has disputed this. If the participation fee was only just
enough to cover the cost of transportation back home, participants’ need for
cash could result in a downward bias. Participants were provided with BDT
200, so that even if a participant purchased rice at the maximum possible price
of BDT 100 (over three times the market value of unfortified rice), and both
practice goods at the maximum combined price of 35 BDT, he would still be left
with BDT 65, which is more than enough to cover the 30 BDT maximum round
trip transportation cost, as estimated by field staff.Our results indicate that bids
for unfortified rice in the comparison group, at 24.4 BDT, were slightly lower
than the market price of the rice used in the experiment (30 BDT). This is ex­
pected, as participants were not necessarily in need of rice at the time of the
bidding sessions, and indicates that any upward bias due to a participation
incentive was minimal overall. However, we are unable to rule out that the
participation incentive affected bids for fortified rice since there is no market
price for fortified rice in the study communities.
6
We note that it is typical to conduct surveys after experimental procedures,
to avoid priming effects. In our case, collecting data before differences across
treatment groups were introduced was important for the heterogeneity analysis,
as survey responses could have been influenced by differences across message
treatments. Further, any potential priming effects of the survey on WTP for
fortification would be uniform across treatment groups, and our primary
questions related not to the level of the fortification premium, but rather to
differences in WTP based on messages given during the sessions.
7
Experimental scripts are provided in the online appendix B.
R. Chowdhury et al.
different classrooms within a schoolhouse to avoid any potential spill­
over effects from participants in different groups interacting between
sessions.
The nutritional drink mix to which fortification was compared was
Horlicks, a brand heavily promoted over the years through radio, tele­
vision, and print media in Bangladesh. This promotion has resulted in a
strong aspirational image among consumers, which is confirmed by the
data from our household survey (see Table A.1 in the appendix for more
details).
The PFDS message informed study participants that while fortified
rice is not available for purchase in Bangladesh, the government dis­
tributes this rice to poor households through the PFDS in two districts,
not including Chandpur. PFDS is the primary social support program for
poor and vulnerable households in Bangladesh, and the FFP, as well as
several other programs, are covered within this umbrella. For study
households, this message implied that fortified rice was being given for
free to poor people like them, elsewhere in the country. While the fact
that fortified rice is distributed to vulnerable populations in Bangladesh
is publicly available online, it is not widely known.
Table 1 below illustrates the combinations of messages delivered to
each of the four experimental groups. The aspirational message read to
participants assigned to T-1 is expected to have a positive effect on WTP.
If the association of fortified rice with the PFDS implies a low product
value, anchors participants on a low reference price, or creates an anti-
aspirational impression of the product, the effect of T-2 could be nega­
tive. On the other hand, if government distribution signals the impor­
tance of consuming fortified food, or the credibility of health claims
associated with fortification, the effect could be positive. The effect of
combining messages in T-3 is likewise ambiguous. An anti-aspirational
effect of associating fortification with the PFDS could weaken or even
reverse the hypothesized positive effect of the aspirational marketing
message. However, if this message serves as a positive signal of impor­
tance or credibility, combining the two messages could lead the com­
bined message (T-3) to have the largest positive impact on WTP, through
an additive or even multiplicative effect.
After the treatment-specific message was read, participants were
invited to inspect samples of fortified and unfortified rice; each pack­
aged in clear plastic bags. The fortified rice offered was created by
mixing fortified kernels into the unfortified rice offered, so that the two
types differed only in terms of the presence of fortified kernels (Figure A-
1 in the online appendix).8
The participants were asked to bid on 1 kg of fortified rice and 1 kg of
unfortified rice using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism.
Table 1
Messages by experimental treatment group.
Information/Messages Comparison Treat.-1 Treat.-2 Treat.-3
(25 %) (25 %) (25 %) (25 %)
Health risks of anemia and ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
zinc deficiency +
benefits of consuming
fortified rice
Aspirational message: × ✓ × ✓
Analogy to Horlicks
Information about free ✓ ✓
× ×
distribution through
PFDS
8
While it is possible to identify fortified kernels by their yellowish color,
these constitute only 0.05 to 2 percent of the blend, resulting in little visible
difference between fortified and unfortified rice. Nor does the fortification of
rice in this way change its smell, taste, or other observable traits. Therefore,
participants’ willingness to pay for the fortified rice is not likely to be influ­
enced by observational characteristics arising from fortification.
5
Food Policy 112 (2022) 102346
Eliciting bids for both types of rice was necessary because the messages
tested could potentially affect willingness to pay for non-fortified rice as
well as fortified rice through framing effects. We calculate the premium
that participants are willing to pay for fortification as the difference
between their bids for fortified and unfortified rice.
BDM auctions are commonly used in experimental economics to
induce participants to bid their actual valuation of a good. In our
implementation of the BDM auction, each participant was asked to
submit the maximum price he was willing to pay for 1 kg of unfortified,
and for 1 kg of fortified rice. As unfortified rice is well known to par­
ticipants, this was consistently offered first as a base case to anchor
participants’ thinking.
After both bids were entered, the type of rice (fortified or non-
fortified) for which the auction was to be implemented was deter­
mined through a random draw. Then, a random price was drawn from a
uniform distribution of prices ranging from 1 to 100. If a participant’s
bid for the randomly selected type of rice was higher than or equal to the
randomly drawn price, the participant had to purchase that rice at the
drawn price, using the compensation provided for attendance.9 Under
this procedure, participants do best for themselves by bidding their true
willingness to pay. A bid below one’s actual valuation risks losing the
good if the randomly drawn price is lower than the participant would be
willing to pay. On the other hand, if the participant bids too high, he
may be forced to buy the good at a higher price than his actual valuation
of the good.
To ensure participants understood the auction procedure, prior to
bidding on unfortified and fortified rice, two brands of soap and two
brands of biscuits were offered through two practice auctions. Aside
from the goods offered and the range of possible prices (1–10 BDT for
biscuits, 1–25 BDT for soap), the procedures for these auctions were
identical to those for rice, including the opportunity to inspect goods
prior to bidding. Purchases of these goods, for those who bid at or above
the drawn price, were implemented prior to the auction for rice. As
purchases during the practice rounds reduced the funds available to
spend on rice, we include in the regression models below indicators for
whether the participant made a purchase in each practice round.
Of the 1,203 primary respondents interviewed, 1,057 (≈ 88 percent)
participated in the auction sessions. The 12 percent attrition rate did not
come as a surprise, considering that 65 percent of respondents worked as
wage laborers, and the auction sessions were held during the day on a
date after the baseline interview. We present the results of a regression
of an attrition indicator on the baseline variables and treatment group
indicators in Table A.2 in the online appendix. Overall, we do not find a
strong association between attrition and baseline characteristics. Our
balance check of the random assignment in section 5 also confirms
similarities between the treatment groups.
4. Empirical framework
We estimate the effects of the message treatments on consumers’
willingness to pay a premium for fortified rice using the following linear
regression model:
∑
WTPrequiredpremium ijk = β0 + 3j=1 βj Tij + βx Xi + γ k + eijk (1).
Where WTPrequiredpremium ijk is an indicator for whether the respondent i
in union (sub-district) k was the willingness to pay a premium at least as
9
A handful of participants did not want to buy the rice even though they won
the bid. These cases occurred during the first week of the experiment, and were,
according to field staff, due to participants’ desire to keep the larger de­
nominations provided as compensation, and avoiding the smaller de­
nominations provided as change for rice purchases, rather than anything to do
with the bidding process. In response, the field team subsequently used smaller
denominations to avoid this problem coming up, after which all winners pur­
chased the rice they had won. The results are robust to excluding observations
from the first week of auctions.
R. Chowdhury et al. Food Policy 112 (2022) 102346

high as the cost of fortification. Tij are indicators for the three treatment
groups (T-1, T-2, T-3). Xi is a vector of household and auction level
covariates for participant i, γ k are union-level fixed effects, and ejik are
individual error terms, clustered to account for correlation that could
result from potential differences in the delivery of messages or imple­
mentation of the auction. Xi includes household demographic charac­
teristics, socio-economic status, involvement in rice cultivation, foods
perceived as nutritious, knowledge of Horlicks, indicators for whether
the participant purchased each of the practice goods, and auction week
(as a measure of the experience of auction session moderators). The
coefficients of interest are β1 , β2 , and β3 , which respectively measure the
effects of the aspirational message, the link to public distribution, and
the combination of the two. We inspect the sensitivity of the estimates
by estimating models both with and without covariates.
We also test whether the effects of the messages vary by households’
poverty level (e.g., food security and asset holdings) and demographic
characteristics (e.g., presence of reproductive-aged women and U-5
children). In measuring treatment effect heterogeneity, we follow the
conventional econometric approach of estimating the interaction be­
tween the treatments and the respective baseline characteristics through
the following linear regression model:
∑ ∑
WTPrequiredpremium ijk = β0 + 3j=1 βj Tij + βx Xi + 3j=1 αj Tij × xi + γk +
eijk (2).
where, xi is an indicator for whether the participant belongs to the
relevant group (e.g., households with a child under 5). The coefficients
of interest are αj , which measure the differential effect of marketing
message j on the subgroup denoted by the indicator xi .
5. Data and results
In this section, we begin by describing balance across treatment
groups. We then turn to the potential influence of providing compen­
sation for participation on the results, before turning to a description of
WTP for fortified rice by treatment group, and then formal analysis of
the impact of the message treatments on this outcome, in a regression
framework.
5.1. Balance across treatment groups
Table A.3 in the online appendix presents summary statistics on
household demographic characteristics, socio-economic status, rice
cultivation, consumption, foods perceived as nutritious, and knowledge
of Horlicks. The table also presents the balance tests for random
assignment of the treatment groups. In sum, we find that our randomi­
zation was effective in creating comparable treatment groups, and re­
spondents across the four groups are mostly similar in terms of socio-
demographic characteristics, rice consumption, and their perceptions
of the aspirational good used in the messages delivered to groups T-1
and T-3.
5.2. Acceptability of and willingness to pay for fortified rice
Column 1 of Table 2 shows the proportion of study participants
overall and by treatment group to whom fortified rice is acceptable,
defined as those who were willing to pay at least as much for fortified
rice as for unfortified rice. Overall, fortification was acceptable to 93
percent of participants. In the group that received information only on
the health benefits of fortified rice, 89 percent bid at least as much for
fortified as unfortified rice, whereas this proportion was 91 percent of
those to whom the aspirational cue was communicated, and 93 percent
of those to whom information about free distribution was given.
Acceptability was highest in group T-3, who received both messages; 99
percent of these participants bid at least as much for fortified rice as they
did for the regular, unfortified rice.
Considering willingness to pay a premium for fortified rice (Column
2), we find that 76 percent of participants overall were willing to pay at
least BDT 3.96 (USD 0.048) more for fortified than unfortified rice,
reflecting the per-kg cost of fortification paid by the Government of
Bangladesh for rice distributed through the PFDS. Again, this proportion
is highest among the group that received both messages, lowest among
the group that only received health information, and intermediate
among the two treatment groups that received either the aspirational
message or information on the link to PFDS.
Table 3 presents the means and confidence intervals of participants’
bids for both unfortified and fortified coarse rice. Overall, participants
were willing to pay an average of BDT 6.8 (USD 0.082) more for fortified
rice than comparable unfortified rice, representing a 25 percent pre­
mium. While the premium for fortified rice is positive and statistically
significant for all four experimental groups, it is highest in T-3 (com­
bined free distribution and aspirational cues) at (30 percent), followed
by T-2 (free distribution) (27 percent). The premiums among T-1
(aspirational cue) and comparison group subjects are the same, at 21
percent above the average bid for unfortified rice.
We note that mean willingness to pay for unfortified rice follows a
similar pattern across the four groups as the fortification premium.
While messaging treatments were not expected to affect WTP for this
rice, it is possible that information on fortified rice altered the reference
price for other rice. A number of studies, including by Thaler (1985) and
Lattin & Bucklin (1989), demonstrate that WTP for a product can be
influenced by purchase context, for example, the prices of other prod­
ucts available at the same shop (Mazumdar et al. 2005). Since our in­
terest is in the magnitude of the premium, we control for these reference
effects in the next section by analyzing the effect of the experimentally
varied messages on the difference in bids between fortified and unfor­
tified rice.

Table 2
Acceptability and willingness to pay for fortified rice.
Message Willing to pay at least as much for fortified Willing to pay a premium of at least USD N
rice as unfortified rice 0.048 (cost of fortification)

(1) (2) (3)

Full Sample proportion 93 % 76 % 1,057
95 % CI [0.91, 0.94] [0.73, 0.78]
Comparison Health benefits only proportion 89 % 69 % 264
95 % CI [0.84, 0.92] [0.63, 0.74]
T-1 Health benefits + Aspirational message proportion 91 % 72 % 264
95 % CI [0.86, 0.94] [0.66, 0.77]
T-2 Health benefits + Free distribution info proportion 93 % 77 % 275
95 % CI [0.90, 0.96] [0.72, 0.82]
T-3 Health benefits + Aspirational message + proportion 99 % 86 % 254
Free distribution info
95 % CI [0.97, 1.00] [0.81, 0.90]

Notes: Two-tailed exact binomial confidence intervals (CI) around the proportion means for corresponding samples are reported in brackets in columns 1 and 2 using
the Clopper-Pearson (1934) method.

6
R. Chowdhury et al.
Table 3
Willingness to pay for unfortified and fortified Rice.
(1)
Message Fortified Rice
Full Sample 33.91 [33.11
34.70]
Comparison Health benefits 29.69 [28.2 31.2]
Group
T-1 Health benefits + Aspirational message 33.23 [31.84
34.63]
T-2 Health benefits + Free distribution info 34.34 [32.75
35.94]
T-3 Health benefits + Aspirational + Free distribution 38.52 [36.79
info 40.25]
Notes: Unconditional mean bids for each type of rice are shown. *, **, *** denote statistical significance of coefficients at the 10 percent, 5 percent, and 1 percent
confidence level, based on a paired t-test.
The distribution of WTP, plotted in Fig. 1, shows substantial
dispersion in preferences for both unfortified and fortified rice, with
longer right tails for fortified rice in all groups. For instance, among
participants in the comparison group, the 90th percentile bid was BDT
42 (USD 0.51), almost three times the 10th percentile bid. The disper­
sion in WTP for fortified rice is greatest in groups T-2 and T-3, the groups
for which the average fortification premium was highest, indicating that
the mean premium is to some extent driven by a subset of consumers
willing to pay much more for fortification than average. For this reason,
and because the commercial viability of fortified rice depends on
whether a sufficient number of consumers are willing to pay a premium
that covers its cost, we focus below on the binary outcome of whether
participants’ fortification premium is at least equal to the government’s
cost of fortifying rice for the PFDS program.
5.3. Effect of the marketing messages on demand for fortified rice
In this section, we measure the effects of the marketing messages on
the participants’ WTP premium for the fortified rice using the empirical
model specified in equation 1. The results are presented in Table 4. In
addition to the specification in equation 1, which is shown in Column 2
of Table 4, we also present results for specifications in which the cova­
riates (Xi ) are excluded (Column 1).
Across specifications, we do not find a significant effect of adding
either the aspirational message or information about distribution
through the PFDS to the cross-cutting information about product attri­
butes and health benefits. However, combining these two messages (in
group T-3) increases the proportion of participants willing to pay the
required premium by 19 percentage points relative to the health infor­
mation only group (p < 0.01). The effect of the joint message has a
stronger effect on demand than either of the individual messages.
The linear combination of the two individual message effects is
similar to that of the aspirational message, at around 9 percent, and not
significantly different from zero (p-value = 0.473). While the effect of
the combined (T-3 group) message is not significantly different from the
sum of the two individual effects (p = 0.168), its magnitude is over twice
as great, suggesting a possible complementarity of messages that the
study was not powered to detect.
To save space, coefficients on the baseline covariates are not re­
ported in Table 4. Three of these were associated with WTP for fortifi­
cation, all at the 10 percent significance level. Respondents with higher
household dietary diversity scores were less likely to be willing to pay
for fortification (coeff. = -0.022, SE = 0.012), suggesting that they may
have perceived fortification as less important to their family’s health.
Those who purchased the soap bar during the auction practice session
were less likely to be willing to pay the fortification premium (coeff. = −
0.070; SE = 0.038). Finally, the auction week covariate, which controls
the auction moderators’ effect, was positively associated with WTP for
fortification (coeff. = 0.022; SE = 0.012).
7
Food Policy 112 (2022) 102346
(2) (3) (4) (5)
Unfortified Rice Difference (std. Fortification N
error) Premium
27.11 [26.56 6.80*** (0.492) 25 % 1,057
27.65]
24.38 [23.25 5.31*** (0.949) 21 % 264
25.50]
27.53 [26.59 28.5] 5.71*** (0.852) 21 %
27.04 [26.01 7.30*** (0.962) 27 % 275
28.06]
29.57 [28.36 8.95*** (1.069) 30 % 254
30.77]
As a robustness check, we also measure the effects of the messages by
a logit regression model and report the results in Table A.4 in the online
appendix. For ease of interpretation and comparison with the linear
regression outcomes, we estimate and report the marginal effects of the
logistic regression estimates. The logit model estimates consistently
match the results from the linear regression model. Furthermore, we
estimated the same models shown in Table 4 with the price premium for
fortified rice as the outcome variable. Results are presented in online
appendix Table A.5. Results are consistent with those shown in Table 4;
we find a significant effect for the combination of aspirational and public
distribution messages. Participants in the combined message group were
willing to pay an additional BDT 3.99 (USD 0.048) on average for for­
tified rice relative to those in the health information-only group. The re­
sults also show a mild positive effect (significant at the 10 percent level)
of the aspirational message cue on the premium for fortified rice.
We note that associating fortified rice with the PFDS is unlikely to
have improved participants’ perceptions of this rice on dimensions other
than the credibility of health claims. In fact, data from the baseline
survey shows that of those who knew about the free distribution of rice,
94 percent mentioned that the government distributes low-value coarse
rice (see Table A.1). When asked if they knew of any special charac­
teristics of the rice distributed through PFDS, only 4 percent of partici­
pants indicated that they did; of these, the majority stated that PFDS rice
is of poor quality or mentioned a negative characteristic (see Table A.1).
5.4. Heterogeneous effects
We next test whether the effect of the messages depends on partici­
pant characteristics. Understanding heterogeneous effects can shed light
on which message interventions are most effective for inducing demand
among subgroups of interest, for example, the poorest or most food-
insecure households. This analysis also allows us to develop insights
regarding the mechanism through which a message affects participants’
valuation of fortified rice.
We begin by testing whether the effects of the messages depend on a
household’s level of food security and asset holdings. In Column 1 of
Table 5, we include the interaction between treatment status and a
dummy indicating whether the household has an above-median value of
the Food Insecurity Access Score (FIAS). We find no evidence that either
WTP a premium, nor message effects, vary by FIAS.
In Column 2, we test whether treatment effects vary by whether a
household’s asset score is above versus below the median value.
Consistent with the analysis based on food insecurity status, asset wealth
is not significantly correlated with WTP. We note a significant hetero­
geneity result for one of the messages: participants from households
with an asset score above the median are 11 percentage points more
likely to be willing to pay the required premium for the rice when
exposed to the aspirational cue (p < 0.05).
Next, we test whether the impact of messages depends on whether
R. Chowdhury et al. Food Policy 112 (2022) 102346

Fig. 1. Kernel distribution of the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for unfortified and fortified rice by treatment groups in Bangladeshi Taka (BDT).

participants live with at least one woman between the ages of 15 and 49
Table 4
or a child below the age of five. We focus on these two groups because
Determinants of consumer willingness to pay for the cost of fortification.
the auction scripts described the health risks of micronutrient deficiency
(1) (2) for expectant mothers and children under five. We find no evidence that
T-1: Aspirational message 0.012 0.011 the effect of the experimental messages differed for households that
(0.057) (0.057) included a woman of reproductive age versus those that did not (Column
T-2: Free distribution info 0.076 0.070
3). However, we do observe heterogeneity across households with and
(0.064) (0.064)
T-3: Asp. msg. + Free dist. 0.187 0.191
without children under five. Within the comparison group, a larger
(0.055) (0.057) proportion of respondents from households with at least one child under
*** *** this age were willing to pay the required premium for fortified rice
Union fixed effects Yes Yes compared to those without young children (Column 4). However, this
Practice round purchase indicators Yes Yes
subgroup was significantly less responsive to the aspirational cue than
Baseline controls, auction week No Yes
Treatment effect of Asp. Msg: T-3 (Comb.) – T-1 (Asp.) 0.175 0.180 others. This could be because Horlicks marketing targets school-aged
(0.043) (0.043) children and pregnant women and does not focus on young children,
*** *** hence these households may not have perceived any additional benefits
Treatment effect of Free dist. info: T-3 (Comb.) – T-2 (Free 0.111 0.121
due to the association with Horlicks, or may even have inferred that
dist.)
(0.051)** (0.052)**
fortification is less important for young children. Lower responsiveness
Sum of individual message effects: T-1 (Asp.) + T-2. (Free 0.088 0.080 to additional messages could also arise if there exists a ceiling in po­
dist. info) tential willingness to pay, which is reached by households with children
(0.110) (0.111) under five when they are provided with health information alone.
Complementarity test: T-3 (Comb.) – [T-1 (Asp.) + T-2. 0.099 0.111
Finally, in Column 5 we test whether participants’ responses to the
(Free dist.)]
(0.079) (0.079) message interventions differed based on educational attainment. We do
Constant 0.743 0.531 not find any heterogeneity in effects along this dimension. The heter­
(0.046) (0.271)* ogenous treatment effect analysis from the logit model also reveals the
***
similar findings (see Table A.6 in online appendix).
N 1,057 1,057
The total effect of the combined message (T-3) on demand for for­
Note: Coefficients shown are estimated via the linear regression model described tified rice among households especially vulnerable to micronutrient
in Equation (1). Willingness to pay a premium at least as high as the fortification malnutrition, whether defined as those with a high food insecurity score,
cost is the dependent variable in all models. Standard errors clustered by auction low asset holdings, inclusion of a member in a vulnerable demographic
session, the unit of randomization, are shown in parentheses. Union fixed effects
group, or low educational attainment, is always positive and significant
and indicators for purchases during practice auction rounds are included in both
at p < 0.1 (see online appendix table A.7).
models. Baseline variables included in the model reported in column (2) are
those shown in Table A.3. *, **, *** denote statistical significance of coefficients
at the 10 percent, 5 percent, and 1 percent confidence level.

8
R. Chowdhury et al. Food Policy 112 (2022) 102346

Table 5
Heterogenous Effects by Food Security Status, Assets Holdings, Household Demographics, and Education Level.
High Food Insecurity High Asset Holding HHs with Reproduc-tive HHs with U-5 Respondent with High School and
Access Score (1) Score (2) Aged Female (3) Children (4) Above Education (5)

T-1: Aspirational msg. − 0.027 − 0.069 0.010 0.102 0.041

(0.079) (0.065) (0.142) (0.070) (0.063)
T-2: Free dist. info 0.046 0.105 − 0.022 0.113 0.066
(0.086) (0.066) (0.171) (0.078) (0.069)
T-3: Aspirational + Free 0.185 0.189 0.175 0.220 0.205
dist.
(0.077)** (0.059)*** (0.204) (0.075)*** (0.061)***
Subgroup indicator − 0.038 − 0.039 0.096 0.147 0.095
(0.057) (0.049) (0.120) (0.072)** (0.074)
T-1 # Subgroup 0.075 0.114 0.001 − 0.256 − 0.124
(0.099) (0.054)** (0.150) (0.079)*** (0.077)
T-2 # Subgroup 0.043 − 0.045 0.096 − 0.108 0.003
(0.087) (0.060) (0.190) (0.086) (0.079)
T-3 # Subgroup 0.013 0.004 0.017 − 0.071 − 0.063
(0.077) (0.056) (0.205) (0.083) (0.084)
Constant 0.431 0.680 0.558 0.459 0.520
(0.241)* (0.252)** (0.264)** (0.270)* (0.277)*
Baseline controls, Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
auction week
R2 0.09 0.10 0.09 0.10 0.10
N 1,056 1,056 1,056 1,056 1,056

Note: Coefficients shown are estimated via the linear regression model described in Equation (2). Willingness to pay a premium at least as high as the fortification cost
is the dependent variable in the models. Standard errors clustered by auction session, the unit of randomization, are shown in parentheses. Union fixed effects, in­
dicators for purchases during practice auction rounds, auction week, and baseline characteristics shown in Table A.3 are included in all models. *, **, *** denote
statistical significance of coefficients at the 10 percent, 5 percent, and 1 percent confidence level.

6. Discussion programs while also encouraging voluntary fortification by private firms

6.1. Summary and interpretation of results
Results from a framed field experiment conducted among a low-
income population in rural Bangladesh suggest that a message posi­
tioning fortified rice as a high-value product and linking it to a gov­
ernment program can increase the proportion of consumers willing to
pay the cost of fortification. The lack of impacts from each message on its
own, along with their strong joint impact when delivered together,
suggests that each conveys distinct information, which may act on
consumer perceptions in complementary ways. Our interpretation is
that connecting fortified rice – a novel product in this context – to a
known, high-value brand, increases its potential value in the minds of
consumers – but that this is insufficient to induce higher willingness to
pay, possibly due to doubts about the credibility of the health claims
made about the rice.
Informing consumers about the distribution of fortified rice through
safety nets might be expected to counter the effect of aspirational
product positioning, thus weakening, or even reversing the impact of
such a strategy. Social marketing campaigns in other settings have
avoided positioning fortified products as food ‘for the poor’. In this
experiment, however, we observed the opposite: consumers who
received the aspirational message and were told that rice was provided
for free through a government program elsewhere in the country were
willing to pay significantly more than those given the aspirational
message alone. We hypothesize that this may be due to the information
about government distribution lending credibility to health claims about
the product. This finding complements previous work on the long-term
impact of limited-term subsidies for health products and points to a
novel mechanism through which subsidies could increase private
demand.
is that an association with free distribution could lead consumers to infer
low product quality or depress price expectations. Our findings
demonstrate that aspirational product positioning can be effective in
such a context.
Our findings stand out from prior experimental studies, which have
not identified marketing messages that significantly increase demand for
biofortified foods. Adopting an aspirational product positioning strat­
egy, while also informing consumers about government investment in
this technology, could significantly increase private demand for fortified
foods in contexts where free distribution is undertaken in parallel with
development of a private market. Rather than downplaying the use of
fortified foods in safety net programs, our results suggest that incorpo­
rating information about public distribution into social marketing
campaigns could bolster their impact on private demand.
We note that the Government of Bangladesh has been praised for
advancing population health through equitable and extensive programs
(El Arifeen et al. 2014, Ahmed et al. 2013, Chowdhury et al. 2013).
Without this positive track record, the effect of associating fortified rice
with a public safety net program may not have been as effective.10
6.3. Limitations and future directions
A limitation of the study is that it was conducted in only one district
of Bangladesh, with participants drawn from a specific population:
beneficiaries of a seasonal rice subsidy, who were verified to meet a set
of commonly used targeting criteria. While this population has great
potential to benefit from the purchase and consumption of fortified rice,
a more representative sample would have allowed us to draw broader
conclusions. A second limitation is that the information about free dis­
tribution mentioned that fortified rice was not available for purchase in
Bangladesh at the time. Thus, participants assigned to this treatment

6.2. Policy implications

Experience has shown that achieving high rates of take-up of
voluntarily fortified foods is possible, but far from guaranteed (Lalani
et al., 2019). A potential challenge faced by governments taking a dual-
track approach of distributing fortified foods through social safety
10
Of course, the messaging interventions studied in this paper are only a small
part of the toolkit policy makers have available to promote fortified food. Other
more direct interventions such as subsidies and regulatory standards are not
studied in this paper but are nevertheless likely to be crucial components of a
market solution for fortified food.

9
R. Chowdhury et al.
may have seen the experiment as a unique opportunity to test a new
product which may have increased their willingness-to-pay. The impact
we attribute to a credibility effect could potentially be confounded by
this effect.
Future research could elucidate the mechanism through which the
messaging interventions studied in this paper affect willingness-to-pay
for fortified rice. For instance, we hypothesize that the message about
governmental distribution affects willingness-to-pay by increasing the
credibility of the product. Future research could test this hypothesis by
collecting data on trust in the government and more detailed attitudes
about different attributes of fortified rice. Furthermore, future research
conducted in a more broadly representative sample, which assesses
demand for fortified rice over a longer time horizon and in a more
natural setting, would provide a clearer picture of the true level of
consumer demand for this product.
Funding
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Govern­
ment of Bangladesh, Directorate General of Food, through the Modern
Food Storage Facilities Project (Contract number SD-21), and the ADM
Institute for the Prevention of Postharvest Loss at the University of Il­
linois, Urbana-Champaign.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Reajul Chowdhury: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investiga­
tion, Software, Data curation, Writing – original draft. Benjamin Crost:
Methodology, Writing – review & editing, Supervision. Vivian Hoff­
mann: Methodology, Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition,
Supervision.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
W e express our gratitude to Alex Winter Nelson, Professor at Uni­
versity of Illinois, for his comments on earlier drafts of the article. We
thank Dr. Shahidur Rahman, Director for South Asia at IFPRI, for
providing institutional support. We would also like to thank Razin Kabir
and Shahadat Hossain at IFPRI for their assistance with the selection of
study sites and the design of the sampling strategy. Special thanks are
due to Mr. Tofazzal Hossain, national consultant at IFPRI, for his support
on logistics management.
Appendix A. Supplementary material
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2022.102346.
References
Ahmed, S.M., Evans, T.G., Standing, H., Mahmud, S., 2013. Harnessing pluralism for
better health in Bangladesh. The Lancet 382 (9906), 1746–1755.
Andrade, J.E., Ali, A.N., Chowdhury, R., Crost, B., Hoffmann, V., Mustafa, S., Shaima, N.
A., 2021. Rice fortification in Bangladesh: Technical feasibility and regulatory
requirement for introducing rice fortification in public modern storage/distribution
of fortified rice through PFDS channels. International Food Policy Research Institute
(IFPRI).
Ara, G., Khanam, M., Rahman, A.S., Islam, Z., Farhad, S., Sanin, K.I., Khan, S.S.,
Rahman, M.M., Majoor, H., Ahmed, T., 2019. Effectiveness of micronutrient-fortified
rice consumption on anaemia and zinc status among vulnerable women in
Bangladesh. PLoS ONE 14 (1), e0210501.
10
Food Policy 112 (2022) 102346
Banerji, A., Birol, E., Karandikar, B., Rampal, J., 2016. Information, branding,
certification, and consumer willingness to pay for high-iron pearl millet: Evidence
from experimental auctions in Maharashtra, India. Food Policy. 1 (62), 133–141.
Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, 2017, Statistical Year Book of Bangladesh 2016,
Retrieved September 5, 2021, from, http://www.bbs.gov.bd/site/page/29855dc1-
f2b4-4dc0-9073-f692361112da/-.
Beninger, S., Robson, K., 2015. Marketing at the base of the pyramid: Perspectives for
practitioners and academics. Bus. Horiz. 58 (5), 509–516.
Bensch, G., Peters, J., 2020 Jan. One-Off Subsidies and Long-Run
Adoption—Experimental Evidence on Improved Cooking Stoves in Senegal. Am. J.
Agric. Econ. 102 (1), 72–90.
Birol, E., Meenakshi, J.V., Oparinde, A., Perez, S., Tomlins, K., 2015 Jun. Developing
country consumers’ acceptance of biofortified foods: a synthesis. Food Security. 7
(3), 555–568.
Bloom, P.N., Pailin, J.E., 1995 May 1. Using information situations to guide marketing
strategy. Journal of Consumer Marketing. 12 (2), 19–27.
Chowdhury, A.M.R., Bhuiya, A., Chowdhury, M.E., Rasheed, S., Hussain, Z., Chen, L.C.,
2013. The Bangladesh paradox: exceptional health achievement despite economic
poverty. The Lancet 382 (9906), 1734–1745.
Chowdhury SK, Hoque MM, Rashid S, Bin Khaled MN. Targeting errors and leakage in a
large-scale in-kind transfer program: The food friendly program in Bangladesh as an
example (Vol. 1935). Intl Food Policy Res Inst; 2020 Jun 12.
Chowdhury, S., Meenakshi, J.V., Tomlins, K.I., Owori, C., 2011 Jan. Are consumers in
developing countries willing to pay more for micronutrient-dense biofortified foods?
Evidence from a field experiment in Uganda. Am. J. Agric. Econ. 93 (1), 83–97.
Clark, J., 2002 Dec. House money effects in public good experiments. Experimental
Economics. 5 (3), 223–231.
Clopper, C.J., Pearson, E.S., 1934. The use of confidence or fiducial limits illustrated in
the case of the binomial. Biometrika 26 (4), 404–413.
Cohen, J., Dupas, P., 2010. Free distribution or cost-sharing? Evidence from a
randomized malaria prevention experiment. Quart. J. Econ. 125 (1), 1.
Copenhagen Consensus. (2008) Copenhagen Consensus 2008 – Results, Retrieved
November 1, 2021, from, https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/
files/cc08_results_final_0.pdf.
Copenhagen Consensus Outcome Page. Outcome – The Expert Panel Findings. (2012).
Retrieved November 1, 2021, from, https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/
default/files/outcome_document_updated_1105.pdf.
Darke, P.R., Chung, C.M., 2005. Effects of pricing and promotion on consumer
perceptions: it depends on how you frame it. J. Retail. 81 (1), 35–47.
De Groote, H., Kimenju, S.C., Morawetz, U.B., 2011 Jan. Estimating consumer
willingness to pay for food quality with experimental auctions: the case of yellow
versus fortified maize meal in Kenya. Agricultural Economics. 42 (1), 1–6.
De Moura, F.F., Moursi, M., Donahue Angel, M., Angeles-Agdeppa, I., Atmarita, A.,
Gironella, G.M., Muslimatun, S., Carriquiry, A., 2016 Sep 1. Biofortified β-carotene
rice improves vitamin A intake and reduces the prevalence of inadequacy among
women and young children in a simulated analysis in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the
Philippines. The American journal of clinical nutrition. 104 (3), 769–775.
De Steur, H., Gellynck, X., Feng, S., Rutsaert, P., Verbeke, W., 2012 Sep 1. Determinants
of willingness-to-pay for GM rice with health benefits in a high-risk region: Evidence
from experimental auctions for folate biofortified rice in China. Food Qual. Prefer.
25 (2), 87–94.
Department of Food & Public Distribution, Government of India. 2021. Centrally
Sponsored Pilot Scheme on “Fortification of Rice & Its Distribution under Public
Distribution System”. October 05, Accessed October 12, 2021.
El Arifeen, S., Hill, K., Ahsan, K.Z., Jamil, K., Nahar, Q., Streatfield, P.K., 2014. Maternal
mortality in Bangladesh: a Countdown to 2015 country case study. The Lancet 384
(9951), 1366–1374.
GoB SSPS, Government of Bangladesh, Social Security Policy Support (SSPS) Programme,
2020, Retrieved November 1, 2021, from, https://mof.portal.gov.bd/sites/default/
files/files/mof.portal.gov.bd/page/672e3d4d_09bb_4205_9afd_843de55481d1/
Safety%20Net%2020-21_English_2020-11-16.pdf.
Gregan-Paxton, J., John, D.R., 1997. Consumer learning by analogy: A model of internal
knowledge transfer. Journal of Consumer Research 24 (3), 266–284.
Gregan-Paxton, J., Moreau, P., 2003. How do consumers transfer existing knowledge? A
comparison of analogy and categorization effects. Journal of Consumer Psychology
13 (4), 422–430.
Harding, K.L., Aguayo, V.M., Webb, P., 2018 Mar. Hidden hunger in South Asia: a review
of recent trends and persistent challenges. Public Health Nutr. 21 (4), 785–795.
Harrison, G.W., 2007 Dec 1. House money effects in public good experiments: Comment.
Experimental Economics. 10 (4), 429–437.
HarvestPlus. (2021). Households reached model – Bangladesh. Internal HarvestPlus
Monitoring Report. International Food Policy Research Institute: Washington, DC.
Herrington CL, Maredia M, Ortega DL, Taleon V, Birol E, Sarkar AR. Bangladeshi
Consumers’ Willingness to Pay for Rice with Improved Nutrition Via Biofortified
Zinc Rice and Decreased Milling Practices. 2021.
Hoeffler, S., 2003. Measuring preferences for really new products. J. Mark. Res. 40 (4),
406–420.
Hoffmann, V., Moser, C.M., Herrman, T.J., 2021 Jan. Demand for Aflatoxin-Safe Maize in
Kenya: Dynamic Response to Price and Advertising. Am. J. Agric. Econ. 103 (1),
275–295.
Jeon, D.W., Park, J.R., Jang, Y.H., Kim, E.G., Ryu, T., Kim, K.M., 2021 Dec. Safety
verification of genetically modified rice morphology, hereditary nature, and quality.
Environ. Sci. Eur. 33 (1), 1–2.
Khan, J.R., Awan, N., Misu, F., 2016. Determinants of anemia among 6–59 months aged
children in Bangladesh: evidence from nationally representative data. BMC
pediatrics 16 (1), 3.
R. Chowdhury et al.
Kok AD, Yoon LL, Sekeli R, Yeong WC, Yusof ZN, Song LK. Iron biofortification of rice:
progress and prospects. F. Shah, ZH Khan and A. Iqbal (Norderstedt: IntechOpen.
2018 Sep 5:25-44.
Kőszegi, B., Rabin, M., 2006 Nov 1. A model of reference-dependent preferences. Q. J.
Econ. 121 (4), 1133–1165.
Kuijken, B., Gemser, G., Wijnberg, N.M., 2017. Categorization and willingness to pay for
new products: The role of category cues as value anchors. J. Prod. Innov. Manage 34
(6), 757–771.
Lalani, B., Bechoff, A., Bennett, B., 2019 Jul. Which choice of delivery model (s) works
best to deliver fortified foods? Nutrients. 11 (7), 1594.
Lattin, J.M., Bucklin, R.E., 1989. Reference effects of price and promotion on brand
choice behavior. J. Mark. Res. 26 (3), 299–310.
Mazumdar, T., Raj, S.P., Sinha, I., 2005. Reference price research: Review and
propositions. Journal of Marketing 69 (4), 84–102.
Meenakshi, J.V., Banerji, A., Manyong, V., Tomlins, K., Mittal, N., Hamukwala, P., 2012
Jan 1. Using a discrete choice experiment to elicit the demand for a nutritious food:
Willingness-to-pay for orange maize in rural Zambia. Journal of health economics.
31 (1), 62–71.
Milani, P., Carnahan, E., Kapoor, S., Ellison, C., Manus, C., Spohrer, R., van den Berg, G.,
Wolfson, J., Kreis, K., 2017 Nov 17. Social marketing of a fortified staple food at
scale: generating demand for fortified rice in Brazil. Journal of Food Products
Marketing. 23 (8), 955–978.
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Bangladesh 2020. Bangladesh Demographic and
Health Survey 2017-18. Accessed August 15, 2021. https://dhsprogram.com/
publications/publication-FR344-DHS-Final-Reports.cfm.
Mkambula, P., Mbuya, M.N., Rowe, L.A., Sablah, M., Friesen, V.M., Chadha, M., Osei, A.
K., Ringholz, C., Vasta, F.C., Gorstein, J., 2020 Feb. The unfinished agenda for food
fortification in low-and middle-income countries: quantifying progress, gaps and
potential opportunities. Nutrients. 12 (2), 354.
Moreau, C.P., Lehmann, D.R., Markman, A.B., 2001. Entrenched knowledge structures
and consumer response to new products. J. Mark. Res. 38 (1), 14–29.
National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT), Mitra and Associates,
and ICF International., 2016. Bangladesh demographic and health survey 2014.
Olson, R., Gavin-Smith, B., Ferraboschi, C., Kraemer, K., 2021 Apr. Food Fortification:
The Advantages, Disadvantages and Lessons from Sight and Life Programs.
Nutrients. 13 (4), 1118.
11
Food Policy 112 (2022) 102346
Omotilewa, O.J., Ricker-Gilbert, J., Ainembabazi, J.H., 2019 Apr. Subsidies for
agricultural technology adoption: Evidence from a randomized experiment with
improved grain storage bags in Uganda. Am. J. Agric. Econ. 101 (3), 753–772.
Oparinde, A., Banerji, A., Birol, E., Ilona, P., 2016 Mar. Information and consumer
willingness to pay for biofortified yellow cassava: evidence from experimental
auctions in Nigeria. Agricultural Economics. 47 (2), 215–233.
Oparinde, A., Birol, E., Murekezi, A., Katsvairo, L., Disressie, M.T., Nkundimana, J.D.,
Butare, L., 2019 Feb 15. Consumer acceptance of biofortified iron beans in rural
Rwanda: Experimental evidence. Gates Open Res. 3 (367), 367.
Sayeed, K. A., & Yunus, M. M., 2018. Rice prices and growth, and poverty reduction in
Bangladesh. FAO: Rome, Italy.
Srivastava, A., Mukherjee, S., Jebarajakirthy, C., 2020 Mar. Aspirational consumption at
the bottom of pyramid: A review of literature and future research directions. Journal
of Business Research. 1 (110), 246–259.
Thaler, R., 1985. Mental accounting and consumer choice. Marketing Science 4 (3),
199–214.
UNICEF, B., 2013. National micronutrients status survey 2011-12. Institute of Public
Health and Nutrition. Accessed December, 2, 2020.
Vaiknoras, K., Larochelle, C., Birol, E., Asare-Marfo, D., Herrington, C., 2019 Feb.
Promoting rapid and sustained adoption of biofortified crops: What we learned from
iron-biofortified bean delivery approaches in Rwanda. Food Policy 1 (83), 271–284.
Van Der Straeten, D., Bhullar, N.K., De Steur, H., Gruissem, W., MacKenzie, D.,
Pfeiffer, W., Qaim, M., Slamet-Loedin, I., Strobbe, S., Tohme, J., Trijatmiko, K.R.,
2020 Oct 15. Multiplying the efficiency and impact of biofortification through
metabolic engineering. Nat. Commun. 11 (1), 1.
Von Grebmer K, Bernstein J, Hossain N, Brown T, Prasai N, Yohannes Y, Patterson F,
Sonntag A, Zimmerman SM, Towey O, Foley C. 2017 Global Hunger Index: the
inequalities of hunger. Intl Food Policy Res Inst; 2017 Oct 11.
Wang, B., Zhan, S., Sun, J., Lee, L., 2009 Oct. Social mobilization and social marketing to
promote NaFeEDTA-fortified soya sauce in an iron-deficient population through a
public–private partnership. Public Health Nutr. 12 (10), 1751–1759.
Yunus, M., Rashid, S., & Chowdhury, S., 2019. Per capita rice consumption in
Bangladesh: Available estimates and IFPRI’s validation survey results (Vol. 3). Intl
Food Policy Res Inst.
Zeithaml, V.A., 1988. Consumer perceptions of price, quality, and value: a means-end
model and synthesis of evidence. J. Market. 52 (3), 2–22.