Abstract
The interest of consumers is the consumption of healthy food, whereas the interest of food manufacturers is that consumers recognize the produced “healthier” food items on the shelves, so they can satisfy their demands. This way, identifying the factors that influence the perceived healthiness of food products is a mutual interest. What causes consumers to consider one product more beneficial to health than another? In recent years, numerous studies have been published on the topic of the influence of several health-related factors on consumer perception. This analysis collected and categorized the research results related to this question. This review collects 59 articles with the help of the search engines Science Direct, Wiley Online Library, MDPI and Emerald Insight between 1 January 2014 and 31 March 2019. Our paper yielded six separate categories that influence consumers in their perception of the healthiness of food items: the communicated information—like FoP labels and health claims, the product category, the shape and colour of the product packaging, the ingredients of the product, the organic origin of the product, and the taste and other sensory features of the product.
Highlights
Which food can be considered beneficial to health? Science and consumers answer this question differently
A nutritious food product generally considered definitely beneficial to health with several positive effects in case of certain diseases can be harmful for consumers suffering from other diseases [6]
In the I. case, on the ScienceDirect surface we looked for the exact term “perceived healthiness” in quotation marks in the “title, abstract or keywords” fields, while “food” appeared in the “terms” field
Summary
Which food can be considered beneficial to health? Science and consumers answer this question differently. A nutritious food product generally considered definitely beneficial to health with several positive effects in case of certain diseases can be harmful for consumers suffering from other diseases [6]. 1) applied the following definition: “Per the United States Food & Drug Administration (FDA), Healthy foods are defined as those that are “low in fat, low in saturated fat, contain at least 10% of daily value for vitamins A, C, calcium, iron, protein fiber” and are limited in amount of sodium and cholesterol (USFDA).” Rodman and his colleagues [5] The importance of “perceived healthiness” is supported by the research findings on health claims by Steinhauser and colleagues [11] that the higher the level of perceived healthiness of a product is, the more likely it is that the product will be purchased. The aim of our literature review is to assemble earlier research and survey the factors that influence consumers in their perception of the healthiness of food
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