Health conscious Irish consumers are not afraid to put their money where their mouth is, writes Laura Slattery

Forking out more for our food in the future won't be a palatable exercise for most shoppers, especially when an EU-wide survey says Irish consumers already pay 21 per cent more for groceries than the EU average.

Raw material prices are shooting up for manufacturers, and economists believe it will be a case of "when" rather than "if" the supermarkets pass along the higher prices to consumers.

But food psychology is a complex science: the big number at the bottom of a till receipt only explains one of the reasons why consumers crave, buy and devour the food they do. Some consumers not only pay more for their sustenance because they can afford to, but because they actually want to.

Researchers at Bord Bia, the body that aims to promote Irish food companies, have identified six overlapping trends driving the way in which shoppers fill their baskets.

Only one of these six trends explicitly mentions price. "Smart shoppers" take pride in finding the best deal, according to Helen King, senior business analyst at Bord Bia.

This does not always involve seeking out the lowest price tag in no-frills shops, however.Instead, smart shoppers blend value-hunting with indulgence purchases and are willing to pay more for convenience - 20 per cent more, according to a recent National Consumer Agency survey comparing prices in convenience stores and in supermarkets.

"Life-on-the-go" is another factor influencing purchases and runs parallel with "living life to the full", the counter-trend whereby the affluent stimulate their senses via urban foodie tours and coffee mornings that are more about training to be a barista than having a cosy chat for charity.

However, in recent years, a "quest for health and wellness" has been the dominant trend influencing shoppers' choices, according to King.

Two-thirds of shoppers always or usually select food on the basis that it has health benefits.

For food manufacturers, it used to be simple to capture this market: cut out a little bit of the fat or a few spoonfuls of sugar and stick the words "low fat" or "diet" on the packaging. But then Japanese company Yakult and French group Danone raised the game, adding "probiotic" to shoppers' vocabulary.

Irish companies such as Glanbia, which owns the Yoplait Everybody and Essence brands, have taken on a category that was controlled here by Danone's Actimel, while Glenisk, Ireland's largest organic dairy, has now added probiotics to its yoghurts.

Consumer demand is increasing for so-called "functional foods", which claim to provide health benefits and to have disease-preventing properties beyond basic nutrition.

"It is becoming increasingly competitive," says Bord Bia's head of consumer foods, Tara McCarthy.

"With functional foods, first you have to establish the category and convince retailers they need to devote shelf space to it. If sales take off, the retailer will then want to bring in [ its own] private-label version. That puts pressure on pricing, so then you have to look at developing a sub-category and convince consumers that your product is different."

So it's back to the lab, compiling another expensive dossier of scientific evidence - at least enough to satisfy consumers and new EU nutrition and health claims legislation. Yoplait boasts that LGG, the probiotic culture in Everybody, is "the most clinically researched" in the world.

But despite our familiarity with terms such as L.casei Immunitas, aspirations are not always matched by reality when it comes to picking healthy foods (see below).

Bord Bia now believes that another of its six trends, "making a difference", will overtake health and wellness in terms of sales growth. The category already has one major international brand with Fairtrade, while "free range" and "organic" are well-established keywords.

The Irish organic market was valued at €76 million last year, with the mainstream retail channels accounting for 85 per cent of all sales.

There is, naturally, a financial cost to having principles. For example, one of the organic farming movement's aims is the introduction of legislation banning genetically modified (GM) ingredients in Irish food. Keeping the Republic GM-free gives Irish producers a nice marketing angle overseas. But with grain prices soaring, it is a policy that pushes up animal-feed costs.

According to Bord Bia, shoppers in the Republic are less cost-conscious than their counterparts in the UK and more concerned with the quality and traceability of food. They want "the real thing"- another Bord Bia trend.

Whether it be a good old-fashioned desire to support local industry or a new aversion to anything that spews carbon dioxide, Irish shoppers feel better when their food is locally produced, and retailers are increasingly keen to capitalise on this.

As part of its carbon reduction programme, Tesco recently enlisted the help of family-owned business Keelings to supply it with Irish-grown peppers, saving an annual 136,200 food miles.

Marks & Spencer (M&S) is the retailer that has suffered the brunt of objections to food-sourcing practices, despite the fact that Tesco is just as British in origin, and that Aldi and Lidl source less of their food from Ireland.

In May, Irish sheep farmers protested outside the M&S Grafton Street store, accusing the retailer of decimating Irish spring lamb producers by stocking their shelves with New Zealand lamb - a product that can only be described as long-haul.

Stewart Nisbet, M&S's new head of foods in Ireland, says the retailer was a couple of weeks late stocking Irish lamb and it has a programme in place to ensure it goes ahead on time next year. This week, it launched an organic range of Irish lamb.

M&S sales of products from Irish producers are up 53 per cent over the last 12 months, and the retailer wants to double its regional food sourcing within 18 months, Nisbet says.

Nevertheless, M&S shoppers will have noticed a glaring problem with its supply chain recently. Restrictions on imports following Britain's foot-and-mouth scare earlier this month left M&S's Irish shelves half-empty, as none of its prepared foods made it into the country.

According to Nisbet, with 15 stores, M&S does not yet have the scale to take on an Irish producer as a partner for ready meals. Even when it reaches its target of 50 Irish stores by 2010, it will have to hunt for a company that can produce the quality it wants, he says.

But for Irish producers, M&S's expansion in the Irish market reflects what is seen as another unfortunate problem: the growth of private labels.

When they don't have brand power, food manufacturers find it trickier to negotiate price increases with retailers, something many are trying to do in the current margin-squeezing climate. And with retailers such as Tesco having as many as three private labels, sometimes only the top two brands in each category keep their place on shelves.

"It's all about profitability per shelf space for the retailer," says McCarthy. "They will be thinking: 'Will I sell food on this shelf, or will I make money selling a telly?'"