Modeling the public attitude towards organic foods: a big data and text mining approach

Anupam Singh,Aldona Glińska-Neweś

doi:10.1186/s40537-021-00551-6

Abstract

This study aims to identify the topics that users post on Twitter about organic foods and to analyze the emotion-based sentiment of those tweets. The study addresses a call for an application of big data and text mining in different fields of research, as well as proposes more objective research methods in studies on food consumption. There is a growing interest in understanding consumer choices for foods which are caused by the predominant contribution of the food industry to climate change. So far, customer attitudes towards organic food have been studied mostly with self-reported methods, such as questionnaires and interviews, which have many limitations. Therefore, in the present study, we used big data and text mining techniques as more objective methods to analyze the public attitude about organic foods. A total of 43,724 Twitter posts were extracted with streaming Application Programming Interface (API). Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm was applied for topic modeling. A test of topic significance was performed to evaluate the quality of the topics. Public sentiment was analyzed based on the NRC emotion lexicon by utilizing Syuzhet package. Topic modeling results showed that people discuss on variety of themes related to organic foods such as plant-based diet, saving the planet, organic farming and standardization, authenticity, and food delivery, etc. Sentiment analysis results suggest that people view organic foods positively, though there are also people who are skeptical about the claims that organic foods are natural and free from chemicals and pesticides. The study contributes to the field of consumer behavior by implementing research methods grounded in text mining and big data. The study contributes also to the advancement of research in the field of sustainable food consumption by providing a fresh perspective on public attitude toward organic foods, filling the gaps in existing literature and research.

Highlights

The most common approach to study customer behavior, including food-related beliefs and emotions, uses the self-reported method, e.g., participants declare themselves their feelings and emotions in interviews or verbal questionnaires [1, 2]
Our study contributes to this line of research by providing further structuring of public attitudes on organic foods based on objective techniques of big data and text mining
Since the consumer behavior towards organic food is changing rapidly due to awareness of environmental degradation, health hazards, and other related issues, this research started with an aim to answer the same existing question- how does the public view organic foods? Numerous studies have been conducted in the past

Summary

Introduction

The most common approach to study customer behavior, including food-related beliefs and emotions, uses the self-reported method, e.g., participants declare themselves their feelings and emotions in interviews or verbal questionnaires [1, 2]. There is growing interest in understanding consumer choices for foods [9, 10] It is motivated, first of all, by climate change a serious global issue that poses an urgent and perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing humankind [11, 12]; the food industry contributes predominantly to these effects. European Union (EU) describes organic production as “an overall system of farm management and food production that combines best environmental practices, a high level of biodiversity, the preservation of natural resources and the application of high animal welfare standards” [15]

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion