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This study aimed to investigate consumers’ perception on sustainable business-and-industry (B&I) foodservice and their willingness to pay a premium for it.

An online survey was conducted. Among the 978 respondents, a total of 548 respondents who used B&I foodservice equal to or more than five times a month on an average were included for analyses.

The result revealed that consumers tended to perceive the concept of sustainability as “equivalent to (32 per cent) or beyond (28 per cent) being green or eco-friendly”. Consumers appeared to perceive the need for and the quality of sustainable B&I foodservice highly, but their awareness was comparatively low. Consumers’ awareness was significantly different across all demographic and food-related lifestyle variables. However, significant differences in the need and perceived quality were found only among food-related lifestyle variables. The result also indicated that 66 per cent of consumers were willing to pay a premium average of USD 0.72, 21 per cent of the reference meal price (USD 3.53) proposed in the survey. Consumers’ gender and eco-friendly dietary lifestyles were the significant determinants in predicting consumers’ willingness to pay a premium.

With concerns over environmental crisis, sustainable development has been a mainstream agenda across the world. However, the issue of sustainable development appears to be relatively overlooked in the field of foodservice research. This study is meaningful, in that it calls attention to the importance and potential of realizing sustainable foodservice and provides a starting point in relevant researches.

To gain strategic insights for promoting sustainable food services, especially in a business and industry (B&I) setting, the purpose of this paper is to investigate decisional factors affecting consumers’ patronage intention based on the extended theory of planned behavior (TPB) including two additional constructs of perceived quality and personal moral norm.

An online survey was employed. Out of 978 responses, 548 (70 percent) responses which reported to have visited B&I food services more than five times a month on an average were analyzed by using structural equation modeling.

The study results revealed that consumers’ patronage intention toward sustainable B&I food services was well explained by the alternative extended TPB adding a new path from subjective norm to perceived behavioral control. The impact of personal moral norm on consumers’ patronage intention was the highest followed by subjective norm, attitude, and perceived behavioral control.

This study is one of the few attempts to clarify the underlying motives for patronizing sustainable food services. The study results may give insights into the mechanisms of consumers’ patronage intention formation toward sustainable B&I food services and provide useful implications for strategic measures to promote sustainable B&I food services in Korea as well as other countries sharing similar concerns and interests.

Despite the growing trend for single-dish restaurants in the Philippines, understanding customer loyalty for this subsector is scarce in the current literature. To address such a gap, this paper aims to identify attributes and their sub-attributes that contribute to customer loyalty for single-dish restaurants.

Using the analytic hierarchy process, the priorities of these attributes in achieving customer loyalty were generated from a group of expert decision-makers. A representative case study in the Philippines with an emerging market trend for single-dish restaurants was conducted.

Findings show that “value” is the most crucial attribute in achieving customer loyalty, followed by “food” and “service” attributes, which are straightforward implications of single-dish restaurants. More strikingly, the “atmosphere” attribute ranks last in the priority list, which may mean that customers consider fancy environments with less priority when dining in these types of restaurants. In the priority sub-attributes, “dining experience” and “tastiness” came up on top of the list, with the “music” attribute ranking last. These findings are crucial inputs to inform the design of strategies that would enhance the customer base.

This study reports the first attempt to rigorously analyze single-dish restaurants, which gain little attention in the current literature, yet an emerging type of restaurant, especially in developing economies. With significant differences in many aspects of mainstream restaurants, customer loyalty attributes may be different. This paper determines the list of priority attributes and sub-attributes of customer loyalty for Philippine single-dish restaurants. Identifying these priority attributes contributes to the extant literature by offering valuable insights for relevant decision-makers in gaining competitive advantage within their market niches.

This study aims to critically evaluate the factual triple bottom line (TBL) sustainability performance of commercial foodservices as featured in peer-reviewed academic publications.

The commercial foodservices’ sustainability performance-related articles were collected for a systematic review. An inductive thematic analysis was applied to the eligible articles.

The contribution of the commercial foodservice sector to the TBL sustainability is highlighted through eight themes: food waste management; food safety and hygiene; food allergy management; provision of healthy meals; local food use; employment of the disadvantaged; well-being of (non)managerial personnel; and noise level management.

The critical evaluation of the actual TBL sustainability measures adopted by commercial foodservice providers highlights the feasibility of the measures, thus calling for their broader industry uptake. Research gaps and issues for future investigations are accentuated for scholars to support the industry in its progress towards the goals of the TBL sustainability.

This study aims to examine the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and idiosyncratic risk in the restaurant industry. The study also explores whether brand diversification magnifies the risk reduction effect of CSR in the restaurant industry.

The study uses an unbalanced panel of 274 firm-year observations for 43 restaurant firms over the period 1995–2015. Models are estimated via fixed effect regression with robust standard errors.

The study finds that CSR involvement reduces idiosyncratic risk and this risk reduction is intensified when restaurant firms operate a portfolio of brands.

The study’s findings are limited to restaurant industry, therefore, generalization of the findings to other industries requires delicate care. Brand diversification is a simple brand count due to a lack of brand sales data.

CSR activities are not cost burden for restaurant firms. Indeed, CSR could be a viable strategy to reduce the volatility in future expected cash flows, hence the idiosyncratic risk. This risk reduction could help owners/managers access to capital with lower cost. Moreover, the study suggests that CSR practices should not be implemented in isolation from firm marketing strategy such as portfolio of brands.

Although prior hospitality research puts forth some evidence using systematic risk as the measure of firm risk, this measure may not best suit the purpose in CSR context given that CSR is a direct, firm-specific strategy. Hence, the current study provides both new evidence with firm-specific, idiosyncratic risk and introduces an important contingency situation when the risk reduction effect of CSR would become more profound for restaurant firms.

Innovative restaurant service designs impart food wellbeing to diners. This research comprehends customer aspirations and concerns in a restaurant-dining experience to develop a service design that enhances the dining experience using the design thinking approach and evaluates its efficiency using the Taguchi method of robust design.

The sequential incidence technique defines diners' needs, which, followed by brainstorming sessions, helped create multiple service designs with important attributes. Prototype narration, as a scenario, acted as the stimulus for evaluators to respond to the WHO-5 wellbeing index scale. Scenario-based Taguchi experiment with nine foodservice attributes in two levels and the wellbeing score as the response variable helped identify levels of critical factors that develop better FWB.

The study identified the best combination of factors and their preferred levels to maximize FWB in a restaurant. Food serving hygiene, followed by information about cuisine specification, and food movement in the restaurant, were important to FWB. The experiment revealed that hygiene perceptions are critical to FWB, and service designs have a significant role in it. Consumers prefer detailed information about the ingredients and recipe of the food they eat; being confident that there will be no unacceptable ingredients added to the food inspires their FWB.

Theoretically, this study contributes to the growing body of literature on design thinking and transformative service research, especially in the food industry.

This paper details a simple method to identify and evaluate important factors that optimize FWB in a restaurant. The proposed methodology will help service designers and technology experts devise settings that consider customer priorities and contribute to their experience.

This study helps to understand the application of design thinking and the Taguchi approach for creating robust service designs that optimize FWB.

This paper is a critical literature review of corporate social responsibility (CSR) research in both general management and hospitality management literature. This paper aims to discuss trends, commonalities and inconsistencies to better understand the state of contemporary scholarship, and it calls for a context-specific conceptual engagement with the phenomenon.

Systematic literature review, noting and critiquing a general tendency towards measurement of financial and other internal benefit impacts.

Hospitality management is well-positioned to evaluate the opportunities and challenges of CSR; yet, research has uncritically adopted the instrumental emphasis on assessing processes, perceptions and private profitability from the general management literature, without engaging on a contextually specific and/or theoretical level.

CSR research is abundant and therefore difficult to summarise in one paper. The primarily Anglo-American and Asian contextual bias is reflected in this review.

Consistently inconsistent results challenge the portability of financial impact studies. Studies are needed to re-evaluate the concept of CSR, as it pertains to hospitality and measure the effectiveness of CSR activities relative to context and resource availability.

Further research into the scope of CSR in hospitality management, with an emphasis on recuperating social value, would lead to widespread positive social implications.

This critical review offers a new perspective on CSR in the hospitality literature and industry, calling for a reconsideration of the concept in context, and formulates a working definition.

The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesise 149 hospitality-related studies published in the past two decades pertaining to environmental management (EM). The review was divided into three main stages: 1993-1999, 2000-2009 and 2010-2014 and provided future research directions.

The study sample consisted of articles published between 1993 and 2014 in four leading hospitality journals. The four journals chosen were the International Journal of Hospitality Management, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management and Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research. The title, abstract and the content, as needed, of all EM-related full-length articles from these four journals were content analysed. Editors’ notes, book reviews, industry news, conference papers and research notes were excluded from this paper.

EM research in the hospitality industry during the first two stages focused on the development of environmental policies and practices, green consumerism, managers’ environmental attitudes, indoor air quality and smoke-free environments, sustainable development, environmental performance, environmental cost control and environmental management systems (EMSs). During the third stage from 2010 to 2014, topics about environmental benchmarking and indicators have surfaced. Notwithstanding this, EM in the environmental reporting, and green marketing have been pursued less enthusiastically.

Compared with the mainstream management literature and considering the future development of EM, hospitality scholars are encouraged to extend their research to include green marketing, environmental technologies, environmental reporting, carbon footprint, employees’ green behaviour, the effects of EM on hospitality firms’ stakeholders and small- and medium-sized hospitality firms. In addition, more effort should be spent on developing hospitality-specific theories for EM.

Little has been done to determine the main research agendas in hospitality EM. A review of recent research on this topic provides an inventory of existing knowledge and points out areas requiring further knowledge exploration.

This study examines and analyzes the relationship between certain organizational variables and technology in certain manufacturing organizations in Jordan. The results of this study indicate that there are positive significant relationships between selected organizational variables (profit margin, management efficiency, organizational age, and organizational size) and technology in the surveyed organizations. While there is a negative significant relationship between the rank of the organization and technology, this study does not confirm any relationship between the organizational ownership type and technology.

The purpose of this paper is to examine corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues in the context of the hospitality industry and offer some avenues for future research.

The paper reviews several domains of CSR and takes stock of some exemplar research from hospitality management pertaining to each domain. Particular note is taken of research that explores CSR issues outside the Western world. Several unanswered questions are then noted along with suggestions for future research.

Based on prior literature, four CSR domains were identified as instrumental, social/legal/political, ethical and environmental. CSR issues in hospitality research have predominantly focused on the instrumental domain while there is scant research on other domains. CSR adoption in the multinational context was identified as due from stakeholder pressures, competitive environment and cultural environment.

The paper identifies some unanswered questions in transnational operations of hospitality firms and suggests avenues for future research.

The paper recommends that due attention must be given to contextual issues in the conceptualization, focus and practice of CSR by multinational hospitality firms.

The paper offers a review of hospitality research on various CSR domains. It offers some unanswered research questions that may spur future research, discussion and debates among academics, students and executives.