Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic and especially the lockdowns coming with it have been a disruptive event also for food consumption. In order to study the impact of the pandemic on eating habits, self-reported changes in food-related behaviours were investigated in ten European countries by means of an online survey. A latent class cluster analysis distinguished five clusters and showed that different types of consumers can be distinguished based on how they react to the pandemic as regards their eating habits. While food-related behaviours were resilient for 60% of the sample, another 35% reported more enjoyment in cooking and eating, more time in the kitchen and more family meals. Among those, a slight majority also showed signs of more mindful eating, as indicated by more deliberate choices and increased consumption of healthy food, whereas a slight minority reported more consumption of indulgence food. Only 5% indicated less involvement with food. As the COVID-19 pandemic is a disruptive event, some of these changes may have habit-breaking properties and open up new opportunities and challenges for food policy and food industry.
Highlights
In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic caused by a new type of virus affected the entire world’s functioning, bringing about far-reaching changes affecting virtually every aspect of life, including food-related behaviours (Eftimov, Popovski, Petkovic, Seljak & Kocev, 2020)
In order to map differences in the extent to which countries were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, we draw on the Oxford COVID-19 government response tracker (Hale et al, 2021) and on those two indices that are most likely to map factors that have an impact on consumer behaviour: The stringency index and the economic support index
The results revealed that despite the pandemic and lock down re strictions, the majority of consumers (60%) engaged in similar foodrelated behaviours to what they normally do, which is in line with previous results on food-related behaviours during the pandemic (Che narides et al, 2020; Ellison et al, 2021; Janssen et al, 2021; Marty et al, 2021; Poelman et al, 2021)
Summary
In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic caused by a new type of virus affected the entire world’s functioning, bringing about far-reaching changes affecting virtually every aspect of life, including food-related behaviours (Eftimov, Popovski, Petkovic, Seljak & Kocev, 2020). In an effort to limit the spread of the coronavirus, most countries introduced restrictions that have affected how people buy and consume food. Many people who used to eat out have had to start preparing meals at home or order ready-made food. It became necessary to adjust eating times to fit own job requirements and children’s schooling on an online system. Restrictions on movement and on the number of people who can be in stores at one time have changed shopping habits, such as buying food less frequently but in larger quantities (Davis, Downs & Gephart, 2021; Wang, Xu, Schwartz, Gosh & Chen, 2021)
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