The effect of food shape abnormality on purchase intentions in China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2014.08.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We examine the impact of food shape abnormality on purchase intentions in China.

  • Environmental concern and social trust drive purchase intentions of abnormal food.

  • High environmental concern increases purchase intentions of abnormal food.

  • Increasing environmental concern in people with low social trust reduces food waste.

Abstract

The assumption that consumers prefer cosmetically perfect fruits and vegetables contributes to global food waste, because food retailers refuse to offer abnormally shaped food. This study empirically examines how food shape abnormality affects purchase intentions and how two individual difference variables, environmental concern and social trust, might moderate the food shape abnormality–purchase intention relationship for consumers in China. A representative sample of 212 Chinese consumers indicated their purchase intentions for two fruits and two vegetables with varying levels of food shape abnormality (normal, moderately abnormal, and extremely abnormal). The results demonstrate that food shape influences purchase intentions; consumers are more likely to purchase normally shaped fruits and vegetables than moderately or extremely abnormally shaped food. However, environmental concern and social trust also drive purchase intentions, such that participants with high levels of environmental concern express higher purchase intentions toward abnormally shaped food. Social trust alone is not sufficient to prompt the purchase of abnormal food, but consumers with high social trust and high environmental concern are more likely to purchase. Thus, increasing environmental concern, particularly among consumers with low social trust, might encourage more people to purchase abnormally shaped fruits and vegetables.

Introduction

Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry.

—Pope Francis (McKenna, 2013)

Food waste has become a popular media topic, because of its relationship with sustainability: If food is wasted, the resources employed such as usage of energy (e.g. transportation), chemicals (e.g. pesticides, fertilizers), water, land, and greenhouse gas emissions resulting from food production have been used in vain (Gustavsson, Cederberg, Sonesson, Van Otterdijk, & Meybeck, 2011). Therefore, food waste implicates a negative impact on the environment (Nellemann, 2009). Between 30% and 50% of the world’s annual food production (or approximately 2 billion tons per year) never reaches consumers (Gustavsson et al., 2011); in developing countries, as much as 40% of food is wasted at the post-harvest and processing levels, due to poor infrastructure, low levels of technology, and insufficient investments in food production systems. In industrialized countries, 40% of food also gets wasted because consumers demand and retailers supply only cosmetically perfect food (Smithers, 2013). In China, as a result of growing affluence and escalating urbanization (Liu, 2013), food consumption has increased in the past decade, and the country’s 1.35 billion people are hungry for more. However, increased food consumption also increases food waste, to an extent that the problem demands immediate action (Liu, Lundqvist, Weinberg, & Gustafsson, 2013). In 2008, daily food waste reached 726 tons in Beijing and 589 tons in Shanghai (Liu et al., 2013).

Expanding Chinese urbanization also has shifted food retailing from fragmented, local markets to larger, centralized supermarkets (Reardon, Timmer, & Minten, 2012) creating a $148 billion supermarket industry. With the entry of international market players such as Tesco, Carrefour, and Walmart, China’s supermarket industry is expected to grow at an annual rate of 12.8%. If Chinese consumers adopt the same unsustainable decision path for judging food on the basis of its physical appearance that their Western counterparts have followed, which constitutes a significant driver of food waste (Gustavsson et al., 2011), global food waste will grow even greater.

In response, this research examines the impact of food shape abnormality on consumers’ purchase intentions and the potential moderation by environmental concern and social trust. Although consumers clearly prefer cosmetically perfect food, leading retailers to discard food that does not live up to such standards, improved understanding of this assumption could better inform retailers’ decision making with regard to what food to showcase for consumers. Furthermore, worsening environmental conditions in China have led to increased levels of environmental concern (Hongyan, 2003) and added environmental issues to public agendas. Thus a recent anti-food waste campaign (“Operation Empty Plate”) by the government urged Chinese consumers to finish their meals in restaurants rather than leaving half-finished dishes (Hatton, 2013). In turn, consumers with greater environmental concerns might react to food shape abnormality differently than consumers with lower environmental concerns. Whether consumers engage in pro-environmental behavior like reduction of food waste also depends on their level of trust in those who regulate or produce food (e.g. government and food industries (Lee & Holden, 1999)). Because trust has been identified as a barrier to acting pro-environmentally (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002) or can leverage the impact of consumers’ engagement in environmental behavior (Blake, 1999, Ozaki, 2011), we anticipate that individual levels of trust in institutions (e.g., government, scientists) might influence consumers’ purchase intentions toward abnormal food.

The closer we move to an understanding of which individual factors provoke Chinese consumers to purchase abnormally shaped food, the better we will be able to design communication campaigns and education programs aimed to inhibit food retailer’s unsustainable custom to only showcase picture perfect food in grocery stores.

Section snippets

Theoretical approach and hypotheses development

According to cue utilization theory (Olson, 1977), consumers rely on extrinsic and intrinsic cues to infer a product’s experience or credence qualities (Grunert, 2005). Intrinsic cues include physical characteristics of the product, such as their color or shape; they cannot be changed without altering the physical product (Akdeniz, Calantone, & Voorhees, 2013). Extrinsic cues instead represent external links, such as brand, price, or product labels. They can be manipulated without modifying the

Participants and procedure

In 2013, 212 Chinese participants were recruited, using an online consumer panel. The average age of the participants was 37.3 years, 44.3% were women (55.7% men), 83.2% were married, 12.8% lived alone, and they were relatively well educated, with 67.4% having a university or college degree. The majority lived in big cities (71.2%). We collected data about participants’ general choices of grocery stores and determined that the majority mainly shopped at well-known stores (25.3%), shopping malls

Manipulation check

Because we used the food shape to manipulate food abnormality, it was necessary to determine that the different shapes had the intended effect of inducing either normal, moderately abnormal, and extremely abnormal food shapes. Therefore, we asked participants to indicate, for each picture presented to them, how normal (abnormal) the depicted food appeared, on a seven-point scale (1 = “very normal,” 7 = “very abnormal”). We analyzed the data with a 3 (food shape abnormality: normal, moderate

Discussion

The results of this study support the assumption that food shape influences Chinese consumers’ purchase intentions. In line with H1, purchase intentions decrease when the food deviates from the norm; consumers are more likely to purchase normally shaped fruits and vegetables than moderately or extremely abnormal food. However, we demonstrate some important boundary conditions for this effect by noting that environmental concern and social trust can drive consumers’ purchase intentions toward

Conclusion

In summarizing the results, it can be said that just like their Western counterparts, Chinese consumers have the highest purchase intentions for normally shaped food compared to any food shape abnormality. Therefore, it is easy to understand that food retailers exclude food that deviates from the norm as our findings support their assumption that consumers request picture perfect food. However, this practice has been identified as main determinant of global food waste. In particular with regard

Acknowledgments

The research reported in this article is part of the Project “LEANGREENFOOD,” funded by the European Commission through contract no. 238084.

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