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Purpose: Consumer acceptance is considered the most important factor in functional food success and is given top priority in new product development. This study focussed on finding factors that influence consumer perceptions about active food and the pattern of active food consumption. This chapter aims to provide a deeper understanding of taste trading based on a consumer decision-making framework.

Research Methodology: Cross-sectional consumer data were collected by floating G-Doc containing the questionnaire which was supposed to be answered by people according to their behaviours, preferences, knowledge regarding functional foods etc. It contained questions about their income, gender, preference towards functional foods, factors affecting decision-making while purchasing functional foods etc.

Results of the Study: The findings suggest that the consumers' attitude towards functional foods was mainly influenced by the quality and suitability of the product. Purchase intent was found based on age, literacy of population, income and health benefits of active foods. Awareness of functional foods and their price significantly affected the purchase of functional foods. Most people were willing to spend more on functional foods in the future regardless of the taste and provided high quality and product suitability.

This chapter focuses on the healthy lifestyle desideratum stretching out of the public policy realm to become a business interest in established and emerging economies. It is argued that retailers, through their marketing and social responsibility strategies, evolve into promoters of a healthy lifestyle at both social and individual levels. The selected examples from Poland illustrate how food retailers, particularly fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retailers, respond to the healthy lifestyle desideratum within an emerging economy.

A qualitative approach is taken. The role and potential activities of retailers to promote a healthy lifestyle are identified by theoretical studies. Then, retailers’ involvement in developing the ‘health and wellness’ market segment as a market opportunity is justified by analyses of competitive trends in Polish retailing. The marketing and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of leading Polish retailers (representatives of different organisational forms) contributing to the development of a healthy lifestyle are presented. Data are drawn from companies’ web pages, interviews, magazines and research agencies.

Recent experience in Poland confirms the finding from previous research that the retail sector in emerging economies is rapidly progressing towards catching up with well-established practices in developed countries. On the demand side, this process is fostered by the rise of middle-class consumers, while on the supply side, the key driver is the fierce competition among international chains and domestic distributors.

Examples drawn from Polish retailing represent good business practices, the relevance of which stretches beyond their local context and renders these business practices shareable.

Awareness is raised of the importance of progressing towards a healthy lifestyle; pragmatic advice is provided on how retailers from an emerging economy can enable changes in consumers’ behaviour.

The business focus on healthy lifestyle development fills a knowledge gap since health science perspectives still prevail in mainstream research on the topic.

The corporate food regime is presented here as a vector of the project of global development. As such, it expresses not only the social and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also the world-historical conjuncture in which the deployment of price and credit relations are key mechanisms of ‘accumulation through dispossession.’ The global displacement of peasant cultures of provision by dumping, the supermarket revolution, and conversion of land for agro-exports, incubate ‘food sovereignty’ movements expressing alternative relationships to the land, farming and food.

In this chapter the aim is to analyse the way the relationship between health and food has been changing at the same time as Spanish society itself. From the beginnings of the consumer society until the present day the modernization process has made its imprint on the guidelines public bodies have issued to the public on caring for their health and diet. Beginning in the 1960s with a welfare idea of a healthy diet, very typical of the decade, and meant for a population with nutritional problems, today we have guidelines for an overfed population. The social trends dominant in each historical moment are shown throughout this transformation process and the dietary recommendations have been part of the social change. However, the perceptions of the administration itself on what constitutes a healthy diet have also made their mark on the criteria. The modernizing nature of the paternalistic administration of the 1960s can be easily seen in contrast with the public bodies of the 1980s competing with the messages from the food and agricultural businesses. As the 20th century drew to a close, dietary advice was in keeping with a background dominated by considerations on the nature of social change and in which both public bodies and citizens trusted in the truths of science as a reference point for correct action. At the beginning of the 21st century, reflexivity and questioning of scientific power appear and also an increase in public preoccupation with food risks. Each stage is analysed relating historical background and dietary recommendations.

Critically reflecting upon the role of and integrative function that relocalisation of agri-food plays in the development of what we call rural and regional ‘webs’ of interconnection, this chapter revisits two regional case studies in Devon and Shetland, UK. Exploring the challenges and continuities in the unfolding of the rural web, we pay particular attention to the role that agri-food initiatives play in mobilising distinctive rural and regional development processes. Although we point in both cases to the marginalisation of agri-food and its potential centrality in rural development, it is clear that this fails to disappear completely. The trends in these two rural regions, at either ends of the UK archipelago, suggest that the combinational effects of declines in multi-functional agri-food support, on the one hand, and a neo-liberalised retraction of non-agricultural rural development support on the other, are providing a potential and chaotic new governance squeeze which is likely to severely reduce the massive but latent adaptive capacity embedded in the rural eco-economy. Indeed, a more multi-functional governance and policy-based approach, based upon creating conditions for the eco-economic rural web to flourish needs to find ways of harmonising different aspects of the post-carbon landscape such that its various segments (energy, tourism, agriculture, creative industries, etc.), can work in synergy with one another. To conclude, we argue that such fragmented and competing conditions as those revealed in both case study areas are unlikely to be sufficiently capable of meeting the new national and global demands for food security which have risen up the political agenda since our earlier phases of field work.

This chapter provides a first systemic analysis of the environment in which small farms operate, hinging on the concept of ‘food system’. Food systems are not detached from the territory: an effective conceptualization must take into account the geographical dimension in which actors operate, originating material and immaterial flows. Thus food systems can be represented according to their functional elements, but also conceptualized and represented in their spatial dimension. This chapter provides a conceptualization of territorialized food systems, seen as a set of relations between actors located in a regional geographic space and coordinated by territorial governance (Rastoin, 2015). In the analysis of a food system in the context of a specific territory, geographical elements like distances, spatial distribution and physical and administrative borders become key factors that influence the systems’ capability to provide sustainable food and nutrition security and to achieve the other socially expected outcomes. Having explored the conceptualization of food systems as systems of actors ad flows in a given space, the chapter ends with a representation of small farms' interaction with the system (taken from a report by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security – HLPE), where the specific types of flows they activate are highlighted (HLPE, 2013).

We aim to understand what happens when larger social and cultural myths become the incarnate understanding of consumers within the firm. This paper uncovers the varied myths at play in one Finnish company’s status as an inadvertent cultural icon.

Through a qualitative inquiry of Finland’s largest dairy producer and by employing the theoretical lens of myth, we conceptualize the entanglement of broad cultural, social, and organizational myths within the organization.

Macro-mythic structures merge with everyday employee practice giving consumer understanding flesh within the firm (Hallet, 2010). Mythological thinking leaves organizational members inevitably bound up in a form of consumer knowing that is un-reflective and inadvertently effects brand marketing management.

Working through a nuanced typology of myth (Tillotson & Martin, 2014) provided a deeper understanding of how managers may become increasingly un-reflexive in their marketing activities. This case also provides a cautionary tale for heterogeneous communities where ideological conflict underscores development and adoption of contemporary myths.

The purpose of this paper is to explore consumer thinking about nutrition decisions and how firms can use consumers’ awareness of the links between nutrients and health generated by public health messages to market products, including ones, which have little nutritional value. We approach this issue by tracking the development of public health messages based on scientific research, dissemination of those messages in the popular press, and use of nutrition claims in food advertisements to assess whether firms are timing the use of nutrition claims to take advantage of heuristic-based decision-making. Our findings suggest that the timing of the development of nutrition information, its dissemination in the press, and use in advertising accords well with a heuristic processing model in which firms take advantage of associations between nutrient information and health in their advertisements. However, the demonstrated relationships may not be causal. Further research will be needed to provide stronger and more comprehensive evidence regarding the proposed message hijacking process. If the message hijacking framework is borne out: (1) simple overall health rating scales could significantly improve consumer decision-making, (2) the impact of misleading advertisements could be mitigated by encouraging a multidimensional view of nutrition, and (3) more intensive regulation of product labeling could limit the impact of hijacked messages.

Overall, this paper considers a novel hypothesis about the impact of public health messages on nutrition and health.