Assessing the impact of an environmental priming strategy on consumers' choice towards innovative foods resulting from new sustainable processing technologies
Non-thermal food processing technologies have been widely researched and developed in the last couple of years and it is important to understand how consumers will perceive and choose them. So far little research has explored European consumer reactions to non-thermal food labels and whether their opinion can be influenced by communication efforts. This work aims to understand if the use of a priming strategy influences people’s choice towards products developed by sustainable innovative food processing technologies, such as orange juice for high hydrostatic pressure (HPP), liquid egg for ultrasound (US), oregano for non-thermal plasma (NTP) and oat drink for pulsed electric field (PEF). Specifically, we investigated the influence of an environmental or non-environmental priming strategy would interfere consumers’ preferences for the products described varying in technology designation (non-thermal and alternative designation), benefits (great flavour and sustainable product) and price (low and high). The research was carried out in three countries: Portugal, Germany and the United Kingdom; 420, 416 and 409 responses were collected through an online choice experiment respectively. It was evaluated whether each prime strategy used was activated (for both environmental and non-environmental) and the consumers who were activated for each priming strategy were analysed. The use of the priming strategy did not change consumer choice, in the three countries studied consumers favoured products with sustainable product benefit and low price (p<.001). Consumers were willing to pay between 0.37-1.04 more for a sustainable product. Nevertheless, in Germany, environmentally activated consumers favoured the alternative technology designation, and they were willing to pay 0.27 more for this denomination, while the others had no preference when it came to technology designation. This study gives an insight into how technologies are perceived by consumers and the factors that influence their choice and how to introduce the new products developed with these non-thermal technologies on the market.
Acknowledgments: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 955431. Authors Silva, Rocha and Cunha acknowledge support from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, through the strategic programs UIDB/05748/2020 and UIDP/05748/2020 (GreenUPorto).
Publish date 2024-09-07
Author(s) Aline R. A. Silva, Célia Rocha, Kemal Aganovic, Rui Costa Lima, Lisa Methven, Luís Miguel Cunha
