Abstract
Consumption of local food is increasing due to its convenience and multiple perceived benefits. However, the factors shaping consumer attitude towards local food and brand love for local food have received limited academic attention. The study thus investigates the under-explored concept of self-identity, attitude towards local food, and brand love, along with contextual variables with respect to local food consumption. Behavioural Reasoning Theory (BRT) is adopted as the theoretical frame in which self-identity is utilised as value, supporting the environment and positive product perception about the food sold by REKO are the reasons for choosing local food, and negative product perception about the food sold by REKO and price are reasons against selecting local food from REKO. Data from 2045 Finnish consumers of local food were collected and analysed, with the findings indicating that self-identity is associated with attitude towards local food, and reasons for as well as against the consumption of local food distributed by REKO. Moreover, reasons for, as measured through supporting the environment and positive product perception, and reasons against, as measured by negative product perception, are associated with attitude towards local food. However, along with reasons for, only price, representing reasons against, is associated with brand love, which, in turn, is associated with attitude towards local food. Reasons and attitude towards local food also have a mediation effect on the hypothesised associations. The findings contribute to improved theoretical insights on BRT, brand love, and local food distribution systems and offer useful managerial recommendations to help promote local food consumption and their underlying distribution systems.
Highlights
Local food is considered highly important by the local communities
To better understand the perception of consumers about local food distributed by REKO, we conducted a qualitative study through semistructured interviews, wherein we interviewed both consumers (n = 9) and non-consumers (n = 10) of local food
In response to RQ1, which queried about the nature of the potential association of self-identity with reasons for, reasons against, and attitude towards con sumption of local food distributed by REKO, we tested five hypotheses, focused on the direct effect of self-identity on reasons for, reasons against, and attitude towards local food distributed by REKO (H1 to H5)
Summary
It offers multiple benefits to consumers, such as transparency of pro duction (Skallerud & Wien, 2019), a natural product content (Lim & Hu, 2016), awareness about the value chain and origins of the products (Holcomb et al, 2018), and other benefits (Costanigro, Kroll, Thilmany, & Bunning, 2014; Hempel & Hamm, 2016). Various national governments promote and support local food products (Jensen et al, 2019), which indicates that the production of these foods can be expected to grow in the years to come. To capitalise on these growing trends, several restaurants have incorporated local food into their menu (Shafieizadeh & Tao, 2020). The market for local food was expected to generate a revenue of more than 20 billion USD in 2020 (Zhang et al, 2020)
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