Abstract
So-called natural food is one of the most significant current trends in the food business. Despite this trend, previous research on the measurement of naturalness has made no distinction between different groups of consumers. Therefore, the objective of this study is to explore the attributes important to millennial university students when evaluating food naturalness. The study is based on a questionnaire administered to a sample of 372 respondents. Using a partial least square (PLS) methodology, it performs a standard confirmatory factor analysis for measurement and validations. As a result, it identifies one attribute linked to how the food is grown and eight attributes associated to how it is produced and processed. These findings have several implications. Apart from testing previous scales in a millennial context, they confirm that market strategies must take different understandings of naturalness into account contingent upon the consumer group.
Highlights
The purpose of this paper is to explore attributes important to millennial university students when evaluating food naturalness
Unlike previous research (e.g., [22]), the results of our study present evidence indicating that millennials do not consider “traditional” production methods as a relevant naturalness attribute to be included in the “way the food is produced and processed” category
The purpose of this study is to explore the attributes of food naturalness important to millennial university students
Summary
The purpose of this paper is to explore attributes important to millennial university students when evaluating food naturalness. The importance of food naturalness for consumers and its impact on their behavior has been widely studied in the literature (e.g., [6,7,8,9]). Previous studies have suggested attributes such as the absence of additives and the presence of natural ingredients [10,11], being unprocessed [12], or containing organically grown products [13]. The attributes considered important when evaluating food naturalness may vary across consumers and different stakeholder groups [9]. To the best of our knowledge, no study to date has analyzed attributes important to this subset of consumers when evaluating food naturalness. This paper aims to shed more light on this issue
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