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The purpose of this paper is to investigate Japanese consumer perceptions of the benefits of consuming fresh leafy vegetables.

An online bulletin board survey was conducted in Japan to collect responses to an open-ended question about reasons for consuming fresh leafy vegetables. A total of 897 responses were analysed using word co-occurrence network analysis. A community detection method and centrality measures were used to interpret the resulting network map.

Using a community detection algorithm, the authors identify six major groups of words that represent respondents’ core motives for consuming leafy vegetables. While Japanese consumers view health benefits to be most important, sensory factors, such as texture, colour, and palatability, and convenience factors also influence attitudes. The authors find that centrality measures can be useful in identifying keywords that appear in various contexts of consumer responses.

This is the first paper to use a quantitative text analysis to examine consumer perceptions for fresh leafy vegetables. The analysis also provides pointers for creating visually interpretable co-occurrence network maps from textual data and discusses the role of community structure and centrality in interpreting such maps.