Changes in Consumers' Food Purchase and Transport Behaviors over a Decade (2010 to 2019) Following Health and Convenience Food Trends.

Tae Jin Cho,Min Suk Rhee,Hye Won Kim,Sun Ae Kim,Sun Min Park

doi:10.3390/ijerph17155448

Tae Jin Cho, Min Suk Rhee + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17155448

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Abstract

Although consumers’ food purchase/transport have been reported as causes of food safety risks, there is a lack of empirical data that are feasible to identify persistent and emerging risky behaviors of consumers. This longitudinal trend study consists of individual consumer surveys in 2010 (n = 609) and 2019 (n = 605) to analyze changes in risky behaviors linked to food purchase/transport over a decade. Overall, the results identified purchase/transport time and purchase order as the emerging and unchanged risk factors, respectively. Consumers’ preferences into channels for purchase (large discount stores rather than small/traditional markets) and transport (using cars or delivery) implied the convenience as the noticeable trend. Whereas, unexpected increases in purchase/transport time highlighted the underestimated risks in long-term exposure of foods under inadequate temperature. Food should not be exposed to danger zones > 1–2 h, but consumers might be unaware of the risk especially for preferred channels (e.g., 77 and 36 min. are required for purchase and transport from large discount stores, respectively). In the case of unchanged risky behavior, more than half of consumers in both surveys did not follow proper purchasing orders. Our findings highlight the necessity for novel countermeasures and the improvement of current consumer guidelines against emerging and unchanged risky behaviors, respectively.

Highlights

Consumers’ food and meal preparation behaviors from shopping to consumption have been associated with various human health issues, including foodborne diseases [1,2,3]
Based on the findings from the cross-sectional survey study highlighting the inappropriate perceptions/behaviors of food consumers corresponding to the food quality/safety issues, this longitudinal survey on a decade basis generally adopted by the trend study [27] was designed to establish the management strategies on ensuring the consumer food quality/safety by the clarification of whether those perceptions/behaviors are improved or not
Convenience is the major keyword in global food industry trends and it is generally exemplified in the decrease in time required for consumer food handling, especially for meal preparation time [18,53,54]; we revealed that food purchase and transport time was not affected by consumers’ preferences for convenience

Summary

Introduction

Consumers’ food and meal preparation behaviors from shopping to consumption have been associated with various human health issues, including foodborne diseases [1,2,3]. Most outbreaks are regarded as being linked to foods eaten outside the home, the private home has been reported as one of the major sources of foodborne illnesses [6,7,8,9]. Foodborne outbreak-associated illnesses have been reported as being attributed to foods consumed at home [8,10], and the number of actual cases is likely to be much higher than estimated, because numerous diseases with mild symptoms might be unreported [6,11]. Public Health 2020, 17, 5448; doi:10.3390/ijerph17155448 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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