Does consumer scepticism impact purchase intention toward palm oil as a food product?

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, the production of vegetable oil crops has expanded more quickly than other food or industrial crops. With a negative impact on the environment and the viability of producing communities, palm oil primarily grown in tropical regions has emerged as the most traded and produced oil globally. Palm oil is increasingly used in many products despite being linked to several troubling ecological, social, and health-related issues. Customers are given a wrong impression of the industry by popular opinion. To examine the reasons behind this disparity in the instance of palm oil, the current study uses an online survey to investigate the influence of consumer attitude and scepticism toward Indonesian consumers’ purchase intention (N = 200). The result showed that consumers’ intention to purchase palm oil as a food product has been influenced by increasing consumer attitude and decreasing consumer scepticism. An increase in consumer intentions to buy palm oil as a food product is driven by this alignment, which gets stronger. The findings of this study provide important new information for developing production and marketing strategies that will improve consumers’ behavioural intention to use vegetable oils.