Abstract
Smart packaging, an emerging technology in the food packaging industry incorporates both active and intelligent technologies. Consumer demand for natural products and increasingly extended and diverse supply chains required to feed the growing global population, mean that traditional packaging is becoming less capable of meeting the functional demands placed on it. To help ensure the commercial success of proposed smart packaging technologies a thorough understanding of consumers attitudes towards them is required. Understanding the cultural, social and cognitive factors that affect acceptance will help ‘fine tune’ smart packaging development to best meet consumer preferences and needs and ensure that communication about the technologies effectively addresses consumer concerns and educates them on the benefits. This systematic review of 26 peer reviewed journal articles summarizes the current knowledge on consumer acceptance or rejection of active and intelligent packaging, and the behavioral forces behind those attitudes. Articles containing primary data and published in the English language over the last 10 years reporting consumer responses to active and/or intelligent packaging technologies in general or to more specific technologies that achieved the functional goals of active or intelligent packaging were obtained and analyzed for themes in the qualitative data analysis software NVivo. Themes were organized into groups as to whether they identified control variables, moderating variables, barriers or motivations to purchase and the benefits of the technology. To develop a conceptual framework for understanding consumer preferences for smart packaging, the identified themes were integrated with several consumer behavior models including the theory of planned behavior and an attitude model. Consumer perceptions of smart packaging is a poorly covered research area with most research being clustered in Europe and a smaller cluster in the Americas so there were significant opportunities to build on the body of knowledge.
Highlights
Consumers don’t purchase packaging; they purchase food products that happen to have packaging built into the product offering
When researching the impact food packaging has on consumer food choice, it is important to center the discussion on how packaging changes the value equation for the food products themselves
The range of reasons consumers find active and intelligent packaging potentially useful ranged from practical utilitarian reasons through to hedonistic emotional and social reasons, and the same was found with the barriers to purchase
Summary
Consumers don’t purchase packaging; they purchase food products that happen to have packaging built into the product offering. When researching the impact food packaging has on consumer food choice, it is important to center the discussion on how packaging changes the value equation for the food products themselves. Review of Smart Packaging Perceptions product characteristic in food choice, one of six key determinants involved. It can be argued that packaging interacts with some, if not all of the other factors given it is a fundamental part of the food product at the point of purchase, e.g., intrinsic characteristic through different levels of protection or psychological factors where novel packaging interacts with a consumer’s food neophobia. Beyond influencing food choice, packaging is incorporated into a food product as a tool to provide functional benefits to the packaged food product. The functions of packaging are most commonly split into four functions (Robertson, 2013) of containment, protection, communication and convenience
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