Abstract
Despite the rapid development of China’s organic food industry in recent years, the market size of this industry remains relatively small. Since the organic food market started late in China, consumer groups are mainly concentrated in large cities at present. It is, therefore, urgent to take effective measures to promote the development of China’s organic food market. The current study focuses on the direct and indirect relationships between food safety incidents and organic food purchases by considering the Chinese context, using stimulus-organism-response model and information use environment theory, and introducing a hyper attention cognitive model. The results show that external stimulus (food safety incidents) and internal stimulus (consumer environment orientation) can significantly affect consumers’ response (namely, consumer organic cognition), and the enhancement of consumer organic cognition can promote consumer organic purchase. In addition, consumers’ information environment (the information relating to food safety incidents and environment) can significantly affect their organic food purchase. Moreover, food safety incidents can attract consumers’ hyper attention and thus has a positive impact on consumers’ cognition of organic food. These findings have important implications for research and practice.
Highlights
In recent years, frequent food safety incidents and environmental problems in China have undermined people’s trust in the traditional food system
Age and per capita monthly income have statistical significance, while the degree of education has no statistical significance in explaining the potential variable of CC
Referencing the SOR model, using information use environment theory and introducing a hyper attention cognitive model, we studied the direct and indirect relationships between food safety incidents and organic food purchases by considering the Chinese context
Summary
Frequent food safety incidents and environmental problems in China have undermined people’s trust in the traditional food system. The issues of agricultural pollution are becoming increasingly prominent, due to the overdevelopment and utilization of agricultural resources, the overuse of pesticides and fertilizers in agricultural production, and so on (Xu and Xue, 2015; Ye and Hui, 2016). These problems have prompted consumers to focus on high-quality, safe and more environmentally friendly food (Liu et al, 2013; Hsu and Chen, 2014). In Chinese food production, organic food is higher quality, safer and more environmentally friendly than food produced by other processes
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