The concept of “quality” in contemporary food systems has become remarkably complex, transcending objective nutritional or health attributes to encompass ethical, environmental, and societal dimensions. This complexity is particularly pronounced in the animal products sector, which faces intense consumer expectations (Prache and Santé-Lhoutellier, 2020). In many parts of the world, the consumption of animal products is, on one hand, a marker of good nutrition and improved living standards, but also, on the other hand, being questioned for its impact on the climate, natural resource use, human health, and animal ethics (id.).

Consumer perception of food quality may differ depending on the country and region of the world, being influenced by a variety of factors. In many countries, especially in the South, food safety is a major concern for consumers due to a lack of strong enforcement institutions and limited private-sector investment. Consumers are often concerned about contaminants, chemical preservatives, and the overall health risks of food. In Kenya, Bukachi et al. (2021) investigated the consumer perceptions of food safety in animal source foods choice and consumption in Nairobi’s informal settlements, showing that lack of traceability of source, unhygienic environments in which they were sold and health risks around consuming too much or improperly cooked products are key in consumers’ perception. They frequently rely on personal mitigation strategies, such as boiling milk or buying from trusted vendors (id.).

Some categories of consumers are more concerned by food safety than others (Miftari et al., 2024) show that in Kosovo the most concerned are usually young, women, and university-educated consumers, who tend to seek higher transparency and accountability from food producers due to greater access to information, and have a stronger connection to the environment and animal welfare. Income also plays a significant role in food choices. In Latin American and African countries, price is often a primary factor for low-income consumers, who may prioritize affordability over other quality attributes (Marsola et al., 2020; Corniaux et al., 2021). Higher-income consumers, on the other hand, tend to show more concern for factors such as health, nutrition, and sustainability (Marsola et al., 2020).

Consumers use various cues to judge quality, including individual physiological and psychological characteristics. Intrinsic cues, such as freshness, taste, and appearance, are often the most important (Ferrari, 2021). Extrinsic cues, such as price, packaging, branding, and country of origin, also influence purchasing decisions (Mehta et al., 2024). In some developing countries, consumers may prefer imported foods with certifications from more developed nations, as these are perceived as safer and of higher quality (Wu et al., 2021).

Since the agri-food sector is characterized by uncertainties regarding product quality, consumers and producers rely on shared understandings and rules to coordinate their actions and evaluate products. Convention Theory (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991) offers a powerful analytical framework for understanding these shared understandings of quality. In this regard, Sylvander (1994), p. 35 defines quality as “uncertainty about the definition and evaluation of the product characteristics taken into account by the partners during a transaction.” The author identifies four quality conventions: i) industrial, referring to compliance with specific standards, i.e., objectified rules external to the actor; ii) domestic, relating to the existence of lasting links between economic actors, links that are based on trust in people or brands; iii) civic, resulting from the adherence of actors to common societal principles; and iv) market, according to which the actors have information and are able to judge the quality of the products on the basis of the characteristics observed during the transactions. These quality conventions correspond to ideal types, which do not exist in reality in a pure but rather composite form. Following the same logic, Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) identify six different logics or orders of worth, which represent six different ways of interpreting entities (people, objects, actions, concepts, etc.). These orders of worth are as follows: i) market (price); ii) industrial (efficiency); iii) inspired (creativity); iv) tied to opinion and/or fame (reputation); v) family (esteem); and vi) civic (wellbeing and collective interest).

Another way to evaluate a quality is to judge its specificity. According to (Allaire and Sylvander, 1997), “a quality, as a characteristic of a product, is specific if its production conditions are based on specific resources, that is to say, non-imitable, either for technical reasons, or due to a specificity of transactions, or for regulatory reasons” (p. 8). According to (Tablier and Nicolas, 1994), it would result from an agreement on a qualification, the benchmarks of which are the origin (as a spatial inscription and historical continuity) and taste. It would stem from a collective representation of the product, taste, and the consumer.

The study of conventions involves understanding where they originate, how they have evolved, and how they will evolve. For example (Sylvander, 1994), analyzes quality conventions for organic products and recognizes a civic convention (respect for the environment and health) that has intervened in an industrial convention (compliance with quality standards). According to the author, two parallel developments are predictable: one oriented toward a domestic convention (maintaining trust between consumers and brands), the other toward market coordination (price reduction) (Marescotti, 2001). notes a ten-year evolution in conventions regarding the quality of Chianina beef in Italy. Local exchanges (domestic conventions), once dominant, have been disrupted by territorial openness and the emergence of new production and consumption models (industrial coordination). In this context, we then witnessed the emergence of a civic-type convention, motivated by the shared desire to preserve a common heritage (Chianina meat). Marescotti thus shows that the decline and revaluation of a specific product are the result of the evolution of different quality conventions. He concludes that the protection and valorization of typical products revolves around the emergence of the civic convention, based on the recovery of domestic coordination.

In order to understand how West-African urban consumers perceive meat quality and safety, we build on Convention Theory. This theory comes from a research program that has been developed from the 1980s, particularly in France and the United States. It is intended as an approach to the problems of economic organization (Marescotti, 2001), positioning itself on the border between microeconomics and sociology. Convention Theory is based on the postulate that “the agreement between individuals, even when it is limited to the contract of a commercial exchange, is not possible without a common framework, without a constitutive convention” (Eymard-Duvernay, 1989). A convention is “a behavioral structure of coordination that offers a resolution process for a recurring problem, by emitting information about identical behaviors of individuals” (Gomez, 1994).

Quality is a social construction, which “sets the rules of an implicit consensus on what should be the objects exchanged” (id., p. 137). The different concepts of quality represent quality conventions. For convention theorists, the aggregation of different forms of qualification “is an indicator flagging the existence of orders of justification or orders of worth” (Daudigeos and Valiorgue, 2010) as proposed by Boltanski and Thévenot (1991). The process of constituting conventions is gradual and spontaneous. It originates from repeated social interactions, initially within a defined domain, then extended to involve other individuals through imitation mechanisms. They thus represent benchmarks, generating information, which simplify decision-making and facilitate coordination between agents. Conventions are constantly subject to evolutionary changes, which result from changes in worldviews, in the interrelationships between individuals, and in their perceptions of the surrounding environment (Marescotti, 2001). The trust that agents place in the convention is not automatic, but they can question it through suspicion. The convention can then evolve in three different ways: 1) it can collapse and disappear; 2) it can be kept alive by some segments of the population and disappear among others; 3) it can integrate the doubt brought by suspicion and broaden “its scope as a problem-solving procedure” (Gomez, 1994).

Quality is a social construct, which pre-exists exchange and production, but also arises from them. “It establishes the rules of an implicit consensus on what the exchanged objects should be and therefore allows the existence of transactions (it is because quality is imposed that the customer chooses)” (Gomez, 1994). The different meanings of quality represent quality conventions, which “intervene in coordination as exogenous to the laws of the market, while strongly structuring it” (Sylvander, 1994, p. 34). Indeed, exchanges are characterized, in reality, by the asymmetry of information on the quality of the object exchanged by the agents. The latter therefore require a prior agreement on what the exchanged quality is. This assumes that they share certain common references before taking part in the transactions (Orléan, 2011).

There is indeed a gap between the objective characteristics of a product and the qualities perceived by the actors. This is a consequence of the impossibility for the actors to perceive and measure all the qualities. Quality conventions serve precisely to reduce uncertainty about quality. If they succeed in eliminating this uncertainty, we will no longer be in the presence of a quality, but of a product characteristic. Consequently, we can only speak of quality if we are in the presence of uncertainty.

Through this study, we aim at verifying the following hypothesis: In the urban markets of the West-African coastal countries, meat quality conventions are dominated by domestic and industrial orders of justification.

The sample of consumption sites is based on two variables: (i) the area of residence and (ii) the socioeconomic status of the respondents. The area of residence was selected as a primary sampling criterion because, in West African urban centers, geography is intrinsically linked to food environment accessibility and socio-economic status. We used national population censuses to allocate the sample. For the second variable, aware of the difficulty of assessing the total amount of household income, we used as proxies: the condition of the house and its furnishings, as well as the respondents’ education level. Indeed, we argue that the level of spending on housing and education is positively related to the level of food spending. To identify and reach consumption sites, we used a snowball sampling technique, which consisted of asking interviewees for other contacts with specific characteristics.

We recall the final purpose of this study is to identify the potential for the West-African livestock sector exports to coastal countries. Knowing that, we decided to focus on meat in the broad sense, that is red meat and the other products that may be considered by consumers as substitutes: white meat and fish. Indeed, it is recognized that households have the tendency to arbitrate among those products based on product accessibility (Wane et al., 2021). Yet, we did not take into account other animal-source foods (such as eggs and dairy products), since they are not considered by consumers as meat substitutes in meal preparation.

The interviews tackled the following issues:

The products consumed, as perceived by the interviewees. It is key to compare the vocabulary used by consumers and the official nomenclature of products, in order to understand the characteristics according to which consumers distinguish the different products (perception of quality);

The focus group interviews were very open and inspired by the register of conversation. They took place in the most usual language for the interviewees. They were recorded to be transcripted afterward. Each interview took between 1 hour and 1 hour and a half, and took place in three phases:

Socio-demographic characteristics (age, level of education, profession, description of the consumption site) and purchase and consumption situations (products consumed, quantities, places of purchase, dishes, etc.);

The interviews were transcribed and coded according to the concepts of Convention Theory. The analysis was carried out using the QDA Miner Lite software (Figure 3). This allows to assign a “code” (see quality convention) to each relevant segment of the interviews and then to gather all the interview segments corresponding to each specific code, in order to have an overview of the discourse of the actors and eventually “quantify” the importance of each quality convention for the interviewees. The different codes or quality conventions were taken from both the scientific literature (Eymard-Duvernay, 1989; Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991) and field specificities.

In the interviews conducted, it is clear to what extent the organoleptic quality convention is predominant in the world of consumer choices–which is easily understandable in the case of food products. Indeed, the first criterion that motivates the preference for one product rather than another is the set of characteristics related to taste, aroma, texture, freshness, visual appearance, or even a preference that consumers cannot explain (Figure 5). The words used to describe these characteristics are numerous: tasty, fresh, soft, bland, hard, fatty, tender, bitter, sweet, sticky, etc.

For example, in the interview extract below, we can see how a Dakar consumer justifies his preference for mutton rather than chicken:

Below another Abidjan consumer explains his passion for mutton based on its taste:

The market convention also occupies a central place in the discourse of consumers, who choose meat products mainly on the basis of their accessibility in terms of price, their availability in their surroundings and also the relationship between quantity and price (Figure 6). For example, in the interview extract below, an Ivorian consumer explains the general preference for pork for reasons related to price:

As one might imagine, buyers must consider not only the absolute price of the desired product, but also the possibility of being able to feed their entire household with it. This is particularly evident in this excerpt from an interview conducted in Abuja:

The financial possibilities of buyers also influence the place and method of purchase: the more fragmented the purchasing power, the fewer alternatives will be available, as this Nigerian consumer explains:

The choice of product also depends on its availability on the market, the offer of which can sometimes be limited in terms of variety, as the Senegalese consumer explains below:

Sometimes, despite budgetary constraints, certain choices are forced by specific occasions, such as religious ceremonies, festivities, etc., as shown by this excerpt from an interview conducted in Nigeria:

Figure 6 shows the benchmarks used by consumers in the three countries within the framework of the market convention.

We have seen that the industrial quality convention ranks third in consumers’ discourse around their preferences. Rather than the type of product, this is mainly reflected in the attention paid to packaging and the point of sale. Most consumers attribute high added value to the “modern” aspect of a product or situation, as clearly demonstrated by the exclamation of this Nigerian consumer:

The extract from this interview conducted in Dakar clearly shows how consumers identify the places of sale that they consider reliable:

Sometimes certain signs of hygienic safety can be used to establish the “industrial” nature of meat–take, for example, what this Senegalese consumer says about the stamps affixed by third-party organizations:

There may also be cases where the “modern” character of a product is considered a sign of poor quality, since there are doubts about the effects that certain methods linked to intensive production and/or industrial preservation could have on health. This is explained, for example, by these consumers from Dakar and Abuja respectively:

Another Ivorian consumer also points this out:

In summary, urban consumers seem to attach great importance to the modern and industrial character of products, and especially to their place of sale, but remain suspicious of conservation methods, the potential repercussions of which they are unaware.

Most of the consumers interviewed showed a preference (which often remains unexplained) for local products, as opposed to products defined as “imported” or “coming from elsewhere.” Expressions such as “at home,” “our products,” “our traditions,” or “we Africans” abound in the consumers’ narrative. Let’s take the example of these Ivorian and Senegalese consumers, who declare:

These expressions can be explained by the comfort that a known and well-controlled situation offers to the person, unlike products or methods that one would not know and which could potentially be a source of danger. Let us see, for example, what some Dakar consumers declare:

Modern processing and sales practices, although sometimes a source of confidence for consumers, can also be accompanied by a certain mistrust, since they call into question the quality “that we know.” This is explained, for example, by these Senegalese consumers:

Figure 7 summarizes the benchmarks on which consumers rely to explain a domestic-type quality convention.

The consumers interviewed were sensitive to the nutritional aspect of the products they purchased. They praised the “vitamin” content of meat products and most declared themselves in favour of “traditional” products because they were richer in nutrients, as in the case of these consumers from Dakar:

The interviewees seem to be sensitive to the risks that excessive consumption of (red) meat could cause to their health, especially for the less young, as shown by these interview extracts from Abuja and Dakar respectively:

Nutritional issues also require special attention to children, who require special nutrition, as this consumer from Abidjan, for example, points out:

In summary, as shown in Figure 8, consumers attribute health benefits to meat (but especially to certain types of meat), such as vitamin intake, especially when the products are considered “organic” (read: from extensive farming); nevertheless, the repercussions that can result from an unreasonable consumption of meat products are also mentioned.

Other quality conventions are mobilized in the narrative of the interviewed consumers: quantitatively, they seem to be less important than those developed in the previous sections, but could actually carry great potential for certain types of meat. We refer to choice criteria linked to belief attributes of products, that is, characteristics that the consumer cannot verify either at the time of purchase or at the time of consumption–they can only believe that the product has a specific characteristic. As an example, we mention the contribution that certain products and/or production systems can have on the local economy and the development of the country. This seems particularly significant in Senegal, where the interviewed consumers often use this argument to justify their purchasing choices:

Another relatively recurring argument revolves around animal welfare, which, according to several consumers, is preserved in free-range farming systems and respectful conditions of animal transport and slaughter. Let’s see, for example, how consumers, respectively Nigerian and Ivorian, approach the issue:

At the same time, we would like to report an excerpt from an interview conducted in Nigeria, which draws attention to a sentiment that goes against the preference for “traditional” livestock farming, pointing to the negative impact that the mobile lifestyle of extensive livestock farmers can have on animal welfare:

Another criterion for choosing meat products is religious, particularly in the case of Muslim households. This has an impact on the level of trust in “new” products (for example, packaged or frozen) and “anonymous” sales outlets, such as supermarkets. Consider, for example, the statement of this Senegalese consumer:

Finally, we would like to mention a selection criterion that relates to the sentimental side of consumers: that attached to the “inspiration” coming from certain producers or production systems. As an example, we report these two extracts from interviews conducted in Dakar: