Abstract
Over the last years, consumer demand for natural and healthy convenient food has increased, and with it the demand for organic convenience food. With convenience food, the processing level increases, which consumers are sceptical of. This holds especially for organic consumers who prefer natural, healthy, and sustainable food products. In the literature, consumer preferences are investigated for processed conventional food, but rarely for organic products. Therefore, this study investigates consumers’ knowledge, expectations, and attitudes towards selected processing technologies for organic food. Nine focus groups with 84 organic consumers were conducted, discussing preservation technologies of organic milk and orange juice. Results showed that participants had little knowledge about processing technologies but were interested in their benefits. Organic processing technologies should include fewer processing steps, low environmental impact, while keeping the product as natural as possible. Since consumers want to know benefits but not details of processing, asking consumers for their specific preferences when developing new processing technologies remains challenging. This paper shows how consumers’ benefit and risk perception including their want for naturalness, and scepticism for new technologies shape their evaluation of (organic) food processing technologies. Two consumer groups with different attitudes towards processing could be identified: ’organic traditionalists’ and ‘organic pragmatics’.
Highlights
IntroductionIn Germany, sales turnover of ready meals and soups increased constantly throughout the last years from 6.3 million euros in 2012 to 7.3 million euros in 2019, and peaked with 8.6 million euros in 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic [3]
This study investigates consumers’ knowledge, expectations, and attitudes towards selected processing technologies for organic food based on the following research questions: ’What do consumers know about food processing?’, ’What do consumers expect from organic processing?’, and ’Which of the presented processing technologies do consumers prefer for organic food?’
Consumers have little knowledge regarding processing technologies and do not want to become experts of processing, they are still interested in the benefits they get from processing technologies
Summary
In Germany, sales turnover of ready meals and soups increased constantly throughout the last years from 6.3 million euros in 2012 to 7.3 million euros in 2019, and peaked with 8.6 million euros in 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic [3] With this increasing demand for convenience food, food processors have developed new food processing technologies to improve microbiological safety, taste, and shelf life [4,5,6,7] consumers are sceptical towards processed and convenience food and supposedly new technologies as they are often perceived as unhealthy, unsustainable, and unnatural [2,7,8,9,10]
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