Abstract
Natural food products are becoming increasingly popular worldwide due to their health and environmental benefits. However, these products' increasing anecdotal popularity has not translated into their widespread adoption; in fact, demand for natural food products remains confined to a relatively small segment of consumers. Despite this, little is known about the facilitators and inhibitors of favourable attitude of consumers towards these products. Recognising this gap, our study employed the theoretical lens of expectancy theory to investigate these factors. Through an extensive review of the pro-environmental consumption literature, we identified four facilitating and inhibiting factors: health consciousness, environmental concern, natural content and price barrier. Our subsequent analysis of responses collected from 357 existing consumers of natural food products in the United States confirmed a statistically significant positive association of health consciousness and natural content with consumers' attitude towards natural food products and a statistically significant negative association of price barrier and attitude towards natural food products. To better understand the overall dynamics of these associations, we also examined the moderation effect of brand love and image barrier. Our results revealed that brand love moderates the association between health consciousness and attitude while image barrier moderates the association between price barrier and attitude. This study's findings make a novel contribution to research and practice related to natural food product consumption.
Highlights
The term ‘sustainable products’ refers to products, including natural food products, that have certain positive social and/or environmental attributes (Bangsa & Schlegelmilch, 2020; Luchs et al, 2010; Xu, Jin & Fu, 2021)
Various aspects of consumers’ behaviour towards natural foods remain underresearched. Taking this lack of research into consideration, our study examined consumer behaviour towards natural food products, discussing the facilitating factors that can produce more positive attitude towards these products
We proposed two research questions to attain the objectives of this study and answered them by analysing responses collected from 357 existing consumers of natural food products residing in the US
Summary
The term ‘sustainable products’ refers to products, including natural food products, that have certain positive social and/or environmental attributes (Bangsa & Schlegelmilch, 2020; Luchs et al, 2010; Xu, Jin & Fu, 2021) This understanding of sustainable products is derived from the triple bottom line framework, which suggests that sustainability can be achieved by optimising performance in three areas: environmental, social and economic (Fung, Chan, Choi & Liu, 2021). Natural and green products (De Medeiros, Ribeiro & Cortimiglia, 2014; Kahupi et al, 2021; Ketelsen, Janssen & Hamm, 2020) are examples of sustainable food products because they are minimally processed and produced in conformance with certain standards (Tandon et al, 2020a; 2020b) Such products are considered healthier, safer and tastier than traditional food products (Olson, 2017). Their increased visibility is attributable to the increasing number of firms that specialise in their production (Kumar, Dhir, et al, 2021), the emergence of speciality stores stocking them (Dominick et al, 2018) and the allocation of greater shelf space for natural products even in traditional stores (Dominick et al, 2018)
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