CONSUMER DECISION-MAKING IN THE ORGANIC FOOD MARKET: A DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE ON GENDER, MARITAL STATUS, AND LOCATION
Keywords:
organic food consumption, consumer demographics, logistic regression, willingness-to pay, Random Forest, chi-square test, gender differences, marital status, rural-urban divide,,Abstract
Organic food consumption continues to expand across emerging economies, yet the
demographic structure of this demand remains insufficiently quantified at the intersection of gender,
marital status, and geographic location. This study surveys 850 consumers across urban, semi-urban, and
rural strata and applies a mixed quantitative pipeline combining chi-square association tests, one-way and
two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), binary logistic regression, and a Random Forest ensemble
classifier to model regular organic purchase behavior and willingness-to-pay (WTP) premiums. Results
show a statistically significant association between location and purchase regularity (χ²=111.52, p<0.001,
Cramer’s V=0.362), a significant gender effect on WTP premium (t=5.70, p<0.001), and a logistic model
achieving a pseudo-R² of 0.186 with urban residence (OR=2.72) and perceived product availability
(OR=1.95) as the strongest positive predictors. A Random Forest classifier trained on the same feature set
achieved 72.3% test accuracy and an AUC of 0.771, with 5-fold cross-validated accuracy of 69.9% ±
4.3%. The findings indicate that geographic accessibility and gender-linked health orientation, rather than
marital status alone, are the dominant demographic drivers of organic food adoption, offering actionable
segmentation guidance for retailers and policymakers.
