The Demand Impacts of Chicken Contamination Publicity—A Case Study Roger A. Dahlgran Dean G. Fairchild Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721–0023 ABSTRACT Adverse publicity regarding food contamination can depress demand, causing lost producer rev- enue+ This study addresses the magnitude of those losses through the analysis of the impact of TV and print news coverage of bacterial contamination of chicken in the United States+ An inverse demand model for chicken is estimated using weekly data from 1982 through 1991+ Our findings indicate adverse publicity about salmonella contamination of chicken depressed the demand for chicken, but that the effect was small, less than 1% during the period of maximum exposure+ Fur- ther, consumers soon forget this news as they reverted to prior consumption patterns in a matter of weeks+ @EconLit citation: D120# © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc+ Food demand analysis focused for many years on linkages between health information and red meat consumption+ Researchers generally hypothesized that over an extended time period, the public dissemination of scientific evidence linking red meat consump- tion to high blood-cholesterol levels and also linking high blood-cholesterol levels to heart disease has caused the demand for beef to decrease and the demand for chicken to increase ~Chalfant & Alston, 1988; Chavas, 1983; Dahlgran, 1987; Eales & Unnevehr, 1988; Moschini & Meilke, 1984, 1989; Wohlgenant, 1986!+ Related demand analysis fo- cused on the discovery of the linkage between egg consumption and high blood- cholesterol levels and the resulting reduction in the demand for shell eggs ~ Brown & Schrader, 1990!+ The ceteris paribus manifestation of these health discoveries is the de- cline in the 1970s and 1980s of per capita red meat consumption and the accompanying increase in poultry meat and fish consumption+ Time plays a critical role in these studies because ~1! the suspected linkage is between current consumption and long-term health, ~2! the linkage was gradually confirmed through scientific studies, and ~3! the informa- tion was presented to and absorbed by the general public over a period of several years+ If these long-term effects exist, then does it not follow that warnings of immediate dan- gers associated with consumption of specific food items should cause immediate declines in the consumption of those food items? This question is of renewed interest as bovine spongiform encephalopathy ~ Mad Cow Disease! and other animal health concerns con- tinue to make headlines+ News coverage of chicken meat contaminated by potentially fatal bacteria provides a setting to investigate this question+ This news coverage was precipitated in March 1987 Agribusiness, Vol. 18 (4) 459–474 (2002) © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/agr.10033 459