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Jutta Roosen

Roosen has made outstanding and continuing contributions to agricultural and food economics through her research on the economics of consumers’ food choices, technology acceptance, and nutrition behavior. Her research into consumers’ decision-making integrates innovative consumer research methods and perspectives from psychological and cultural theories to answer questions of why consumers behave as they do.

Roosen is internationally recognized as an outstanding researcher with more than 90 journal articles on impactful topics that affect agricultural and food industries and society at large.  She has contributed to the advancement of consumer and food economics by developing experimental and empirical approaches to study consumer food choices. She has been a leader in understanding consumer technology acceptance such as the genetic modification or the use of nanotechnologies in enhancing food product properties and packaging.

Related to that is her advancement of our understanding of consumers’ concern about food safety issues. In particular, her research of chemical contaminants such as pesticide residues or mercury in fish help to understand if and how consumers are willing to trade off benefits and risks in their food choices.

She integrates her insights on consumers’ technology acceptance and concern about food safety issues into her coverage of market demand which helps greatly in understanding the functioning of food markets, and how food markets are influenced by consumers navigating through a maze of products labeled with different claims. Her research covers, for example, the placement and demand of organic products or the pricing of GMO-free products. Roosen has expanded knowledge about food technology acceptance to wider coverage of credence attributes and consumers’ moral concerns in particular regarding nanotechnology and animal welfare.

Her studies give deep insights into the effect of policy interventions on consumers and producers.  She has contributed to the field of the economics of nutrition by analyzing consumers’ healthy food choices, for general and specific consumer groups such as children and adolescents or the poor. Her studies showed that policy interventions such as nutrition or traffic light labeling can have decisive effects on consumers’ food choices. Her research on new tools employing interactive communication technologies shows their effectiveness in helping young consumers make healthier food choices.

Roosen has had a significant impact on the agricultural economics profession through her service and leadership in the AAEA and her European working environment. Currently, she is President of the European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE). She has been an active member of the Food Safety and Nutrition (FSN) section of the AAEA since 2000 where she has served as an executive member over two periods. Roosen has contributed to greater international cooperation across professional associations.  She has led the organization of a series of joint AAEA and EAAE seminars, starting with the first joint seminar  on the Economics of Food, Food Choice and Health at the Technical University of Munich. She chaired the scientific program committee of the EAAE Congress in 2014, a major success with more than 600 participants in Slovenia. Roosen has served on editorial boards for several agricultural and applied economics journals.  She was an editorial board member for the European Review of Agricultural Economics, for the Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, and the Agricultural Economics journal. Recently she has become co-editor of Food Policy that she previously supported as a member of the advisory board.

Throughout her career, Roosen has taught and mentored undergraduates, graduate students, and junior professionals. She has strengthened the higher education in consumer and food economics, in particular through her leadership establishing an international Master’s program in consumer science with a unique course mix of quantitative research methods and applied economics.