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Healthy eating behaviour in adolescence may be negatively affected by lack of self-regulation. The purpose of this paper is to discuss strategies for regulating eating behaviour as formulated by adolescents themselves.

Self-regulatory strategies were elicited with concept mapping, which is a group-based method. Three meetings were conducted with each of four school classes in Denmark. Participants in the 12-15-year age group were recruited for the study. At the first meeting, participants had to complete the phrase “Things I can do to ensure my healthy eating are: […]”. At the second meeting, participants had to group the statements. At the third meeting, the results were discussed with participants.

The results suggest that adolescents’ knowledge about healthy and unhealthy eating is in line with the official guidelines provided by health organisations. Adolescents made 142 statements about things they could do to ensure healthy eating; the statements were grouped by adolescents, and 12 strategies were formulated: following nutrition recommendations, developing own rules, making healthy deals with oneself, ensuring the right balance and regularity of food intake, awareness: remember to eat healthy, thinking of consequences, good advice for shopping and cooking, seeking help from parents, influencing family and others, avoiding temptations, replacing unhealthy food with a healthier option and reducing the amounts of unhealthy food in diet.

Focusing on improving adolescents’ self-regulatory skills in the domain of eating behaviour is a promising approach in developing future interventions.

The present article explores self-regulatory strategies for eating behaviour in adolescence and discusses their relevance.

Consumers can be an interesting source of knowledge if companies manage to attract them to an interactive process of new product development (NPD). The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors influencing consumers’ willingness to participate in NPD activities.

A survey with 1,038 respondents was held in Denmark. Food products for weight management were used as an example to further explore these issues and test the research hypotheses. Data were analysed by means of hierarchical regression analysis.

Results indicated that consumer innovativeness is a key factor to stimulate participation. An increase in either cognitive or emotional dimensions also encourages consumer interaction with the company. Weight perception and willingness to participate is moderated by age group. These findings can help managers to identify key segments when developing new food products for weight management.

This study has proposed and tested a model based on relevant literature and validated scales using a model generation approach to discuss motivations and factors that influence willingness to participate in NPD projects in the food sector.

The aim of this study was to examine what reasons consumers give for either choosing or not choosing functional foods. Laddering interviews were used to find out how consumers described their reasons for choosing functional food alternatives in different product categories and how these descriptions are linked with values. Yoghurt, spread, juice, carbonated soft drinks, sweets and ice cream were used as example product categories. In total, five central means‐end chains, describing the product attributes, consequences and values behind respondents’ food choices, were found, which referred to healthiness, taste and pleasure, security and familiarity, convenience and price. They were found to be independent from each other and had different connotations depending on the product category. The results indicate that respondents did not see functional foods as one homogenous group over different product categories. Instead, consumers seemed to perceive functional products as a member of the general product category such as yoghurt or spread and only secondarily as a functional food.

When new processing technologies are introduced to the food domain, consumer acceptance is one of the key issues for their future success. The purpose of this paper is to study whether consumers are ready to accept a new high pressure freezing method for food processing when different benefits are attached to the processing method.

Consumer attitudes towards high pressure freezing were surveyed in The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Finland (n = 936).

Generally, attitudes towards high pressure freezing were neutral, even though the term was unfamiliar for most consumers. When given some information about high pressure freezing technology, consumers considered applying this method as appropriate, especially if it had advantageous consequences to the product. Processing method itself was considered less important than price or environmental impact when the relative importance of choice criteria was studied with conjoint analysis.

Not having to raise the price and possible environmental benefits seem to be the most crucial factors for promoting the acceptance of high pressure freezing as a new processing method in food processing.

The paper shows that advantages of high pressure freezing technology, like decreasing the probability of microbial spoilage or improving the quality of products, had the clearest influence on consumers' appropriateness ratings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between consumers’ cultural values and their functional food perception.

The research is qualitative in nature and uses the grounded theory method. The data were collected through in-depth interviews with three ethnic groups, Anglo-Australian, Chinese and Indian ethnic groups in Australia. The constant comparative data analysis approach was used to analyse the interview text.

The results indicate that there is a relationship between consumers’ cultural values and their functional food perception. Functional food perception depends upon the consumers’ predisposition towards their culture, their motives for functional food consumption and the level of perseverance towards functional foods.

The study includes only three ethnic groups and is qualitative in nature, which may limit its generalisability to the universe. The inclusion of more ethnic groups and additional sources of data could form directions for future research.

Functional food marketers can assess the kind of cultural values the ethnic groups in Australia uphold and capture those values in their marketing strategies. The cultural values in the framework could be used for the segmentation of functional food consumers. In a multicultural setting like Australia, segmentation of consumers based on the standard values would be more feasible and effective to target consumers spread across different ethnic groups but who uphold similar values.

The research has attempted to fill the gap in the existing literature about the relationship between culture and functional food perception. The latent variables in the theoretical framework proposed by the qualitative enquiry can be a good starting point for understanding the influence of cultural values on functional food perception and the development of a more comprehensive theoretical framework for functional food behaviour.