Search results

This study aims to increase knowledge of the ability of nutrition labels to guide consumer choices in real-life environments.

Food consumption and plate waste data were collected from two self-service restaurants (SSR) with different customer groups over six observation days: three control and three intervention (with nutrition labelling) periods. Study Group 1 consisted of vocational school students, mostly late adolescents (N = 1,710), and Group 2 consisted of spa hotel customers, mostly elderly (N = 1,807). In the experimental restaurants, the same food was served to the buffets during the control and intervention periods.

The nutrition label in the lunch buffet guides customers to eat fewer main foods and salads and to select healthier choices. Increased consumption of taste enhancers (salt and ketchup) was observed in the study restaurants after nutritional labelling. Nutrition labelling was associated with a reduction in plate waste among the elderly, whereas the opposite was observed among adolescents.

The results provide public policymakers and marketers with a better understanding of the effects of nutrition labelling on consumer behaviour. Future studies should further evaluate the effects of nutrition labelling on the overall quality of customer diets and the complex environmental, social, and psychological factors affecting food choices and plate waste accumulation in various study groups.

The customers are demanding the products which are not only healthy but also clean and environment friendly i.e. call for sustainable consumption products. Therefore, this study aims to identify the important drivers of organic food purchase intention.

A cross-sectional research design involving the collection of primary data from 234 respondents was adopted in this study. Responses were gathered from the consumers of organic food representative of the Indian population. Structural equation modelling was applied to analyze data and validate the research model.

The findings of the study would help practitioners understand the factors leading to the purchase intention of organic food products in a growing consumer market. This knowledge would help them devise marketing and communication strategies to increase the consumption of organic food products.

The present study advances existing literature on organic food consumption by extending the theory of planned behaviour with factors, namely, environmental concern, convenience and trust, and establishing their role in developing the purchase intention for organic food products.

Los consumidores demandan productos no sólo saludables, sino también limpios y respetuosos con el medio ambiente, es decir, productos de consumo sostenible. Por lo tanto, este estudio pretende identificar los principales factores que influyen en la intención de compra de alimentos ecológicos.

En este estudio se adoptó un diseño de investigación transversal que incluía la recogida de datos primarios de 234 encuestados. Las respuestas procedían de consumidores de alimentos ecológicos representativos de la población india. Se aplicó un modelo de ecuaciones estructurales para analizar los datos y validar el modelo de investigación.

Las conclusiones del estudio ayudarán a los profesionales a comprender los factores que conducen a la intención de compra de productos alimentarios ecológicos en un mercado de consumidores en crecimiento. Este conocimiento les ayudaría a diseñar estrategias de marketing y comunicación para aumentar el consumo de alimentos ecológicos.

El presente estudio avanza la literatura existente sobre el consumo de alimentos orgánicos mediante la ampliación de la TPB con factores, a saber, la preocupación por el medio ambiente, la conveniencia y la confianza, y el establecimiento de su papel en el desarrollo de la intención de compra de productos alimenticios orgánicos.

顾客要求的产品不仅是健康的, 而且是清洁和环保的, 即呼吁可持续消费产品。因此, 本研究旨在确定有机食品购买意向的重要驱动因素。

本研究采用横断面研究设计, 从234名受访者中收集原始数据。受访者的回答来自于代表印度人口的有机食品消费者。采用结构方程模型来分析数据并验证研究模型。

本研究的结果将有助于从业者了解在不断增长的消费市场中导致有机食品购买意向的因素。这些知识将帮助他们制定营销和沟通策略, 以增加有机食品的消费。

本研究通过扩展TPB的因素, 即环境关注、便利性和信任, 并确定它们在发展有机食品购买意向中的作用, 从而推进了现有的关于有机食品消费的文献。

Although not yet fully defined, natural wine represents a sector that has gained the widespread attention of final consumers and, therefore, also of the restaurant world, because of its promise of sustainability. The objective of this paper is to understand Italian haute cuisine's interest in natural wine, with the aim of analysing what qualifies this product as sustainable.

After introducing a theoretical framework based on the concept of natural wine, a brief paragraph is dedicated to consumer preferences; subsequently, the analysis focusses on a questionnaire given to restaurateurs to determine the impact that natural wine has had in the Italian context. The results try to identify the importance that restaurateurs give to the characteristics of natural wine and their propensity for using such wine in their own businesses.

The analysis, conducted on a sample of medium-high range restaurants, highlights their strong interest in natural wine, as a result of the final consumers' attitude towards wine with characteristics attributable to sustainability. The positive perception by restaurateurs is similar across Italy, both geographically and in terms of the size of the restaurant.

The originality of the work is the focus on the world of restaurants. To date, the literature on natural wine remains embryonic and always refers to the final consumer. This research is the first step in a broader study that will involve a greater number of restaurants, extending beyond Italy to all of Europe, with the aim of understanding the real development potential of natural wine.

The sustainability of the global food system hinges on its environmental resiliency and safety, including the health and well-being of its labor force. Single disciplinary courses in liberal arts or science often fail to highlight the overlap between environmental and social vulnerabilities that lead to food insecurity and diminish the sustainability of food systems. This paper aims to present the design and delivery of a successfully co-taught, interdisciplinary module on agricultural labor and sustainable food systems as a case study.

The authors designed a co-taught module in which they joined each other’s respective history and science class sessions at the undergraduate business college where they teach. Innovating the cross-disciplinary content of food security, immigration status, labor exploitation and pesticide exposure, they approached sustainability from the disciplinary perspectives of labor history and environmental science to show how these elements had both unique and overlapping impacts across food systems levels. Comparisons between pre- and post-module survey responses, alongside assessments of a co-authored exam question, measured the effectiveness of this module is changing students’ perspectives as food consumers and as citizens.

This module altered students’ understanding and perspectives around issues of food systems sustainability. Assessments indicated that students increased their awareness of agricultural workers at the front end of the food system, during production; students also gained awareness beyond consumption as they came to see the connections between workforce invisibility and ecosystem degradation.

These insights are valuable to educators at all institutional levels who seek to collaborate on sustainability initiatives and teaching, both in the singular, robust modules and in building modules that will lead to the development of entire courses focused on sustainability. The module described here builds on previous demonstrations of the value, significance and effectiveness of cross-disciplinary collaborations; it pioneers the use of the food system as the link between social and environmental sustainability education.

It is globally recognized that food waste has significant economic, social and environmental impacts. This study endeavors to identify the individuals' underlying factors that affect food waste behavior in a social context in Egypt.

Due to the scarcity of research illustrating food waste in a social context, a qualitative research paradigm is employed. In-depth semi-structured interviews are conducted with 18 Egyptian households to report their experiences, thoughts and feelings while eating in a social context.

Based on thematic analysis using grounded theory procedures, eight main elements affecting creation and reduction of food waste in social contexts are identified. Additionally, the authors investigate the role of emotions in social dining contexts. A key finding is that food waste in social events is inevitable and is the acceptable norm in the Egyptian culture. Thus, the first step to reduce food waste is paying more attention to change culture. Persuading people with the negative consequences of food waste issue on behalf of their cultural values will be more challenging and may require more innovative approaches.

Although food waste issue is one of the contemporary issues in the world, very little is known about how social food consumption leads to food waste behavior. This study employs social influence theory and the collectivistic culture orientation to investigate the unanswered question of why food gets wasted in social meal context.

The estimation of the burden of a disease is one of the tasks with the longest tradition in health economics, which allows us to know the volume of resources that a country allocates to a specific health problem, and to compare countries and diseases. Although the fundamental objective of health systems is not to reduce the cost of the disease, but to improve the health of the population, the studies of burden of disease establish the economic seriousness of the problem, orienting the priorities of action.

Government-funded medical expenditure in Uruguay for the last ten years has tripled in US dollars. The increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity has contributed to this growth. According to the World Health Organization, Uruguay has the highest growing trend in the prevalence of both overweight and obesity in South America. We have previously estimated that economic burden linked to obesity will be more than US$500 million by 2020, a figure close to 1% of the country’s GDP.

In this study, we tried to generate a measure of value to ascertain the cost of inaction in the fight against obesity and its consequences linked to several non-communicable diseases. The cost of inaction is not defined as the cost of not doing, but as the cost of not implementing the right policies (in this case health prevention policies) at the right time.

The main goal of this paper is to identify the attributes of consumer experience in Michelin-starred restaurants and to estimate their effects on restaurant ratings.

A sample of 70,233 online reviews of 224 Spanish Michelin-starred restaurants were analysed with the latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm. A sentiment analysis and a logistic regression analysis were also employed to estimate the effect of attributes on restaurant ratings.

Customer attention, food quality, decor and ambience and value for money are frequently used to define restaurant experience. However, it is shown in this study that the experience in a Michelin-starred restaurant goes beyond the evaluation of those four attributes. Furthermore, the effect of the factors that were identified on customer satisfaction differed depending on the restaurant ratings.

The findings are linked to the context of Spanish Michelin-starred restaurants. It is also assumed in this study that online reviews are based on truthful opinions.

Restaurant managers should primarily focus on customer attention and food quality to achieve customer satisfaction. In addition, those restaurants with an error-free service and a highly appreciated wine list among diners are more likely to achieve the culinary excellence that deserves a 5-star rating on TripAdvisor.

The attributes of the restaurant experience are frequently identified in literature reviews. Research based on text-mining analyses of customer reviews to discover a posteriori the factors that define a restaurant experience is scarce, and particularly difficult to find in the context of Michelin-starred restaurants.

This study aims to investigate the impact of the innovative ritual-based redesign of a routine in the challenging context of the dining-out sector, characterized by low employee commitment and high turnover.

This study adopts a mixed methods experimental design. This study focuses on a field experiment in a real restaurant centered on the restaurant’s welcome entrée routine. The routine is first observed as it happens, after which it is redesigned as a ritual.

The ritual-based redesign of the routine enhances employee sharing of the purpose of the routine and reduces the variability of the execution time of the routine, which increases group cohesion among the restaurant staff. Besides the positive impact on the routine’s participants, the ritual-based redesign has a beneficial effect on the performance of the routine by increasing the enjoyment of the end-consumers at the restaurant.

The ritual-based redesign of routines is a powerful managerial tool that bonds workers into a solidary community characterized by strong and shared values. This allows guidance of the behavior of new and existing employees in a more efficient and less time-consuming way.

Rituals have been traditionally analyzed from the customer perspective as marketing tools. This research investigates the employees’ perspective, leveraging ritual-based redesign as a managerial tool for increasing cohesion among workers.

The purpose of this study is to examine the trend toward purchasing locally grown food and evaluate if tourists visiting Hawai'i are willing to pay more for locally produced foods that are more ecologically sustainable.

A research questionnaire was developed in order to investigate the attitudes and behaviors of tourists from the continental United States visiting Hawai'i in purchasing locally grown food in Hawai'i. The final sample includes 454 valid survey responses collected via Momentive, a market research services company.

According to the findings of this study, there are economic prospects to expand the use of locally cultivated food into the tourists' experience, as well as a willingness for tourists to support these activities financially. The Contingent Valuation study revealed that tourists from the continental United States were ready to pay a higher price to purchase food that is locally grown, signifying that tourists to Hawai'i are willing to aid the local agriculture business by increasing their restaurant/hotel meal bill, which will help Hawai'i become a more sustainable tourist destination.

While tourists from the United States mainland, which is the “an islands” top tourist market, have agreed with paying extra or an additional fee for locally grown food products, this study might not accurately represent the attitudes and behaviors of international tourists visiting Hawai'i. Future research should focus on the international tourist markets which may have different social norms or cultural differences thus could provide a broader spectrum of the current study's findings.

The results of this study provided quantitative evidence that tourists from the United States are interested in purchasing locally grown food items in Hawaii in addition to their willingness to pay an additional fee for these locally grown food products at a restaurant or a hotel dining room, thus addressing a gap in the tourism research.

“Social eating initiatives” are framed as a specific type of community-based food service that provides opportunities for people to eat together in local spaces using surplus food. These initiatives provide a meal that is fresh, affordable and more environmentally friendly than fast or convenience foods. In this research, we build upon the food well-being model to explore how food consumption is experienced in these community settings and the role of social eating projects in shaping the different dimensions of people's foodscapes. We adopted a community-based participatory approach and engaged in a series of dialogues with staff volunteers and coordinators at four “social eating initiatives”. We also conducted 45 interviews with service users and volunteers at three sites in the Midlands region.

The role of community-based food initiatives responding to hunger by utilising surplus food to feed local populations is often conceptualised critically. However, closer attention to the experiences of staff, volunteers and customers at these spaces, reveals them as sites where knowledge and experience of food is being developed with this contributing to a sense of well-being beyond nutrition. Shared food practices and eating together contribute to social capital and are important dimensions of food well-being that are significantly restricted by food insecurity. The “food well-being” model envisages a shift in focus from health, defined as the absence of illness, towards well-being as a positive relationship with food at the individual and societal level. In the concluding remarks of this article, it is suggested that this holistic conception is required to understand the role and function of social eating initiatives.