Abstract
The primary purpose of this study was to explore how food dealers develop methods that facilitate transaction efficiency and how they select the optimal food channels. This study establishes a model according to the impact of transaction cost factors on consumers’ decision-making regarding purchase of fresh snack foods. Using fresh snack foods in Taiwan as an example, this study employed a fuzzy analytic network process to solve decision-making problems with multiple criteria by comparing the interaction between each transaction cost factor to obtain the factor weightings as well as the weightings of the transaction costs at each decision stage. This study found that food safety assurance and providing sufficient nutrition information were the most essential topics; thus, the optimal choice for snack food producers is to develop retail outlets. This study construction process proposed is innovative and operational, and the results may provide a reference for snack food dealers or microfood enterprises to assist them in developing their food channels.
Highlights
The rise of the Internet has enabled the rapid flow of information and various improvements in life convenience, both of which have led to various lifestyle changes
Because of the increasing trend of Western cake with coffee food culture emerging in Taiwan in recent years, as well as the substantial reduction in tariffs following Taiwan’s accession into the World Trade Organization in 2002, food and beverage industries have been constantly introducing snacks, desserts, and pies with distinct national characteristics
Convert the decision makers’ and experts’ linguistic variables into triangular fuzzy numbers “∼” to represent the subjective intensity. This improves the imbalances in the measuring scales of the analytic network processes (ANP) method to make the evaluation process smoother and define the eigenfunction of the symmetrical triangular fuzzy numbers ∼
Summary
The rise of the Internet has enabled the rapid flow of information and various improvements in life convenience, both of which have led to various lifestyle changes. Compared with the short supply of snack foods in earlier times, snack foods have shifted from being luxury goods to being normal goods. Snack foods have existed for a long time, the term was introduced only in recent decades. Because of the increasing trend of Western cake with coffee food culture emerging in Taiwan in recent years, as well as the substantial reduction in tariffs following Taiwan’s accession into the World Trade Organization in 2002, food and beverage industries have been constantly introducing snacks, desserts, and pies with distinct national characteristics. The quality of the snack food market has been markedly affected by rapid changes in the types of snack foods that are available, their sale through convenience store sales channels (Taiwan has the highest density of convenience stores in the world), and the introduction of the home delivery distribution model
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