Abstract
Healthy food choices are crucial for a healthy lifestyle. However, food choices are complex and affected by various factors. Understanding the determinant factors affecting food choices could aid policy-makers in designing better strategies to promote healthy food choices in the general public. This study aims to evaluate the food choice motivations and to segment consumer groups, according to their food choice motivations, in a sample of 531 Italian consumers (collected by convenience sampling), through offline and online survey platforms. K-means cluster analysis was applied to identify consumer groups using six food choice motivation categories (health, emotional, economic and availability, social and cultural, environmental and political, and marketing and commercial). The results suggest that the strongest determinants for the food choices of Italian consumers are Environmental factors and Health. Two consumer profiles were identified through the segmentation analysis: Emotional eating and Health-driven consumers. The respondents were found to have a good awareness of what comprises a healthy diet. There is a potential market for healthy and sustainable food products, especially products with minimal or environmentally friendly packages. Food labels and information strategies could be promoted as tools to assist consumers to make healthy food choices.
Highlights
The food that we consume affects our future health
We investigated the motivations behind food choices in Italy and segmented the surveyed consumers to provide recommendations on effective tools to encourage healthy food choices
The main results indicated that some factors influenced consumer food choices more than others; for instance, in line with the previous literature [11,14,16,17,18,19], “Environmental and Political” and “Health” motivations were the most important determinants of food choices for Italian consumers, while “Marketing and Commercial” motivations were of the least concern [20]
Summary
The food that we consume affects our future health. Diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, stroke, and some types of cancer, have been increasingly causing health problems in both developing and developed countries [1,2]. Policy-makers have been trying to introduce several different tools to encourage populations to consume healthier foods and reduce their intake of unhealthy foods, through initiatives such as nutritional education programs and fiscal programs (i.e., sugar drink taxes), among others. Despite these attempts, obesity has greatly risen in the past two decades, even in countries where the rates have been historically low, such as Italy [3]. Obesity in adult remained below than the EU average (15%), nearly one in five 15-year-olds in Italy (18%) were overweight or obese in 2013–2014, a share close to the EU average [4]
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