Does terroir size matter? Protected geographical areas and prices of European hams

"Manually gathered data from online store websites operating in 11 EU countries, namely Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. These countries were chosen based on the following criteria. Our study encompasses all countries of origin of an eligible GI ham that have the euro as currency. Also, it includes the Netherlands as a major pig meat producer (Augère-Granier, Citation2020) and Ireland as a major ham importer (Török & Jambor, Citation2016).

We selected 36 online stores of established supermarkets that are present with physical stores in the respective city chosen for delivery, for example, Monoprix in Paris, REWE in Berlin or Coop in Rome. To avoid strong price differences due to strongly different store types we excluded specialty shops focusing on specific product categories. Online grocery shopping is a rather new phenomenon, but it has gained popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic and is expected to grow also after the crisis (Günday et al., Citation2021). However, the product offer on online stores might differ across a country and some supermarkets may offer online shopping only in certain cities. To ensure consistency we only gathered observations on supermarket websites providing home delivery in the respective capital’s centre. We collected these cross-sectional data in April 2021.

With the help of thoroughly defined characteristics, we ensure comparability of hams included in our sample. GI and non-GI hams belong to the same product category of raw hams often sold in the ‘charcuterie’ (prepared meat) section. In this category, we only consider hams made from pig meat and exclude hams such as Bresaola, which is made from beef. Moreover, we focus on raw ham made from the hind leg. Thus, hams can only be air-dried and/or smoked, but not cooked and different cuts such as Italian Coppa or Spanish Paleta which are shoulder cuts are excluded. Moreover, the product must be pre-sliced and sold in a regular plastic package, which is the most common and standard packaging in supermarkets. Complete haunches of ham are seldomly offered and seem to represent a niche product mainly found in specialty shops. Finally, we exclude products with special features, for example, ‘less salt’, ‘less fat’ or ‘truffle’ hams.

Although our full sample comprises more than 768 GI and non-GI hams, our main sample considers only 190 GI hams. The reason is that we cannot use the areas (km²) as a variable for our full sample because non-GI hams are not regulated regarding their production area. Nonetheless, we used our full sample to determine whether PDOs and PGIs have a positive effect on price compared with non-GIs and to scrutinize the influence of relevant control variables which are described in the following section. While PDO hams with typically stricter product specifications are associated with higher expected prices, PGI hams do not show such a statistically significant positive association when being compared with non-GI hams. For the results of our full-sample regressions, see Appendix A in the supplemental data online."