Balancing Health, Sustainability, and Food Assurance in Fast-Food Choice: A Discrete Choice Experiment in Taiwan

Fast-food choices increasingly involve trade-offs among health, sustainability, food assurance, and price. This study employed a discrete choice experiment to examine consumer preferences and willingness to pay for health-related, sustainability-related, food-assurance, and monetary attributes among 401 respondents in Taiwan recruited through an online convenience-sampling approach in August 2025. The experiment included nutrition labeling, a health-oriented cue, carbon labeling, food traceability, an alternative-food option, and a price premium. Choices were analyzed using conditional logit and random parameter logit models, and marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) was estimated for each non-price attribute. All five non-price attributes significantly increased choice utility, whereas the price premium had a significant negative effect. The highest MWTP point estimate was observed for nutrition labeling (TWD 12.63), followed by the health-oriented cue (TWD 11.76), food traceability (TWD 10.59), carbon labeling (TWD 8.05), and the alternative-food option (TWD 7.84). This ordering should be interpreted descriptively because pairwise statistical differences among the MWTP estimates were not formally tested. Random parameter logit estimates were broadly consistent with the conditional logit results, with significant unobserved heterogeneity detected only for the conventional alternative-specific constant. Overall, the findings indicate that respondents assigned positive value to health-, sustainability-, and food-assurance attributes while remaining sensitive to additional cost, supporting the joint consideration of these attributes when examining consumer preferences in fast-food choice.