Factors Affecting Chinese Consumer Awareness and Acceptance of Japanese Rice

Abstract

Since arice trade agreement between China and Japan was signed in 2007, Japanese rice has been exported to Chinese market for almost five years. High labor costs in Japan and high tariff level resulted in the price of Japanese rice were over 15 times higher than domestic rice, i.e. a rice with brand name of “Koshihikari” has a price at 99 RMB/kg, and Miyagi’s rice called “Love at first sight” costs 94 RMB/kg. Japanese rice was regarded as a luxurious food for Chinese families. However, we found that Japanese rice in the Chinese supermarket has maintained a good sales record during the past four years. For example, in January 2009, 24 tons of Japanese rice was sold out quickly. This phenomenon has attracted our attention and interest to investigate the extent of Chinese consumers’ awareness and acceptability of Japanese rice. Consumers’ purchase behavioron foods has been well studied (Ippolito et al., 1990; Gila et al., 2000; Sedjo and Swallow, 2002; Soregarol et al., 2003; Cranfield and Magnusson, 2003; Matsumoto et al., 2004; Wu and Fu, 2007; Yang and Wang, 2010). Many researchers have analyzed how different demographic characteristics of consumers (such as age, gender, income, education level, race, family size, region, etc) influence their cognition and acceptability for the certain food products in the market (Gao, 1993; Buzby et al., 1995; Thompson et al., 1998). The research on Chinese consumer’s awareness and purchase behavior mainly focused on food safety aspects (Wang, 2003; Zhang et al., 2004; Zhou, 2004; Chen, 2006; Zeng et al., 2007). Li and Guo (2007) studied the cognition and purchase behavior of consumers in Nanjing city of China on safe rice and showed that consumers’ education level, household income, and cognition of safe rice played a significant role on their purchase decision on safe rice. However, there are as yet few studies which focused on rice specifically on imported Japanese rice. The scarcity of empirical studies concerning purchase behavior on Japanese rice and its relevance for market justify addressing this as a research topic. The objectives of this study were to identify the situation of Chinese consumers’ cognition and acceptance on Japanese rice and to analyze the factors that significantly affected their purchase behavior.