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• Consumers across five European countries perceive sustainability labels as helpful. • Across five European countries, preferences for product attributes were similar. • Meat and dairy consumers value animal welfare information more than environmental sustainability. Food production systems, especially meat and dairy supply chains, contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. An important question emerges as to whether consumers care about environmental sustainability when buying food products, as this can determine their consumption practices. Further, if sustainability labels are available, identifying information that is relevant to consumers is important. This research therefore aimed to identify the attributes that are most important for consumers when buying meat or dairy products and the perceived helpfulness of sustainability labels for meat and dairy products and important label properties. An online survey was conducted in five European countries (i.e. Czechia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK). Consumers valued similar attributes when buying meat and dairy products across all countries. Freshness , quality/taste and animal welfare emerged as the most important attributes, while environmental attributes such as food miles , carbon footprint , and organic production were the least important. Sustainability labels for meat and dairy products were perceived as helpful. Regression analysis identified similar patterns within all five countries regarding the predictors of the perceived helpfulness of sustainability labels. Attitudes towards sustainable food consumption , environmental attitudes , and food production and policies emerged as significant positive predictors in most models. Most importantly, information regarding animal welfare , food safety , and health and nutrition was perceived as being more important than environmental sustainability. This suggests that food choice decisions are unlikely to be made based on the environmental sustainability of a food product's production alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Meat commitment is a negative and significant predictor for the importance of animal welfare. • Committed meat eaters are less likely to endorse universalistic values (i.e. animal welfare). • Animal welfare remains important when it is in direct conflict with three different policy goals. • Animal welfare appeals directly to personal values. • Agricultural policy needs to evolve together with personal values. Animal welfare is one of the key agricultural policy goals and is considered extremely important by consumers. With the increasing urgency for a sustainable and healthy dietary shift, it could be one of the key motivators for behaviour change. Therefore, we investigate how consumers perceive the importance of animal welfare not only as an agricultural policy goal but also in comparison to conflicting goals, such as domestic food production, farmers' income, and consumer prices. We investigate how the weighing of animal welfare as an agricultural policy goal is related to individual behaviour (i.e. meat consumption), values and attitudes, such as meat commitment, the perceptions of farmers and the Ecological Welfare scale (which includes animal welfare and environment protection). Thus, we conducted an online survey in October 2022, recruiting a sample of 1542 participants (51.5% women) in equal parts from the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland. Participants were asked to evaluate the importance of increased animal welfare in three situations with the following conflicting policy goals: (1) increasing domestic food production, (2) reducing consumer food prices, and (3) increasing farm incomes. Regression analysis revealed that the influential predictors in all three models were similar. Being a woman, politically left leaning, and less committed to meat eating, having a more negative perception of farmers, and assigning more importance to ethical food consumption increased the probability of putting more weight on animal welfare in all three goal conflicts described above. The finding that participants who were more committed to meat eating tended to assign less importance to animal welfare when weighing the three conflicting agricultural policy goals is well-aligned with the current literature. Implications for agricultural policy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]