Passionate about food: exploring “foodie” segmentation by nutritional knowledge

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to empirically identify foodie features and examine their relevance in segmenting German consumers. Furthermore, this study explored potential differences between foodie segments in terms of food involvement and food knowledge.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were collected from 500 German respondents in October 2015 by means of two online surveys using a newly developed version of the foodie instrument based on existing literature. Confirmatory factor analysis, cluster analysis, analysis of variance and post hoc tests were applied to analyse the data.

Findings

Six distinct consumer segments were identified: passionate foodies (12.0%), interested foodies (21.5%); moderate foodies (21.7%), traditional foodies (17.1%), light foodies (18.2%) and non-foodies (9.5%). The nutritional knowledge questionnaire suggests that passionate foodies have only an average level of food literacy compared to other segments.

Research limitations/implications

Behavioural traits and socio-demographic characteristics of foodies and other culinary consumer segments could be time-sensitive, thus future research should take a longitudinal approach so that subsequent decision-making is appropriately dynamic.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper is a first step towards the development of a new foodie lifestyle scale which will be useful to identify, characterise and develop effective marketing strategies for targeting highly involved food consumers.

Citation

Gunarathne, A., Hemmerling, S., Labonte, N., Zühlsdorf, A. and Spiller, A. (2022), "Passionate about food: exploring “foodie” segmentation by nutritional knowledge", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 39 No. 7, pp. 678-690. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCM-10-2019-3470