Abstract
The consumption of food has a significant impact on the environment, individuals and public health. This study aims to investigate the integrative effects of consumers’ personal and situational factors on their attitude and purchase behavior of organic meat. The consumption of this product has been widely regarded as contributing towards sustainable food practices. The study was conducted in an emerging market economy, i.e., Vietnam. Data were collected using a customized and validated survey instrument from a sample of 609 organic meat consumers at four food outlets in Hanoi. The findings suggested that consumers’ concerns regarding the environment, health, food safety and their knowledge of organic food, all significantly impacted their attitude towards the purchase behavior of organic meat. Interestingly, their positive attitude did not necessarily translate into their actual purchase of organic meat. Additionally, food stores’ green marketing practices significantly enhanced consumers’ actual purchase behavior. Conversely, premium prices of organic meat were certainly a deterrent for the actual purchase of organic meat. The findings of this study have several important implications for organic food producers, retailers, policy makers and socio-environmental organizations that seek to develop intervention strategies aimed at increasing organic meat consumption in Vietnam.
Highlights
It is well known that the consumption of food has a significant impact on the environment, individuals and public health [1,2,3]
This study aims to enrich the literature on organic food behavior in developing and emerging markets, which have received less attention from scholars [11]
Similar to earlier work [22], the findings reveal that price barriers negatively affect consumer purchase frequency of organic food
Summary
It is well known that the consumption of food has a significant impact on the environment, individuals and public health [1,2,3]. Food consumption is associated with environmental issues such as increased greenhouse gas emissions, water scarcity and pollution [2]. The consumption of beef has a substantial impact on the ecosystem. This is owing to the fact that the production of protein generates a relatively high amount of carbon dioxide, e.g., an equivalent of 221.63 g of carbon dioxide is generated per gram of protein [4,5]. Consuming food containing undesirable residues and microorganisms causes severe individual health problems, e.g., pain, Int. J. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 1037; doi:10.3390/ijerph16061037 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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