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British Food Journal Understanding consumers’ intention and behaviour towards functionalised food: The role of knowledge and food technology neophobia Francesco La Barbera Mario Amato Giuliana Sannino

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Understanding consumers’ intention and behaviour towards functionalised food The role of knowledge and food technology neophobia Downloaded by Professor Francesco La Barbera At 02:31 21 April 2016 (PT)

Francesco La Barbera

Knowledge and food technology neophobia 885 Received 8 October 2015 Revised 22 December 2015 Accepted 29 December 2015

Department of Political Sciences, Univerisity of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy, and

Mario Amato and Giuliana Sannino Department of Agricultural Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, Portici, Italy Abstract Purpose – In recent years, the food industry has developed and brought to the market a number of “functional food” with healthy characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to study and compare the effects of knowledge and food technology neophobia on individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for functionalized healthy food. Design/methodology/approach – In order to explore these effects in hypothetical vs real settings, an experiment defined by a within-subject design with two treatments (functionalized vs conventional food) on two auction payment conditions (hypothetical vs real) has been conducted. The products chosen for the experiment were two different types of crushed tomatoes: conventional crushed tomatoes (control product) and a crushed tomatoes enriched with lycopene (functionalized product). Findings – Results showed that participants stated, on average, a higher WTP for tomatoes enriched with lycopene than for conventional. This positive premium price was not affected by socio-demographic variables, political orientation and tomato-related preferences. As expected, the level of knowledge about lycopene exerted a significant positive effect on premium price in both auctions condition. Also the Healthy choice subscale of the Food Technology Neophobia Scale (FTNS) was a significant predictor of premium price, but only when the auction was hypothetical. Originality/value – This paper might shed some light upon the predictive power of the FTNS on individuals’ behavior in a real market setting. Keywords Consumer behaviour, Functional food, Experimental auctions, FTNS Paper type Research paper

Introduction The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of knowledge and food technology neophobia on consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for functionalized food, both in hypothetical and real scenarios. The functional food market has increased rapidly in recent years. This global growth is strongly related to the increased consumers’ awareness about the role of diet in maintaining an optimal level of health and for the prevention of specific diseases related to dietary imbalances (obesity, hypertension, osteoporosis, diabetes, cardiovascular

British Food Journal Vol. 118 No. 4, 2016 pp. 885-895 © Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0007-070X DOI 10.1108/BFJ-10-2015-0354

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diseases) (Zoltán et al., 2012). Moreover, given the economic costs deriving by the treatment of those diseases, authorities have developed actions and policies to promote the consumption of functional food (Peake et al., 2001). In recent decades, driven by the continuous development of modern society and the multiplication of consumer’s needs, the food industry has developed and brought to the market a number of completely new foods, which are developed to foster consumers’ health. These products, better known by the term “functional food,” have been created by the food industry with the aim of improving the health value of food, in addition to the usual nutritional value (Sedef and Sebnem, 2011). Looking at the shelves of supermarkets, it is easy to realize that an increasing number of products claim to be “poor in fat,” “low in sugar,” “without hydrogenated fat,” “low sodium” and so on. The great success of these products in terms of sales led food companies to develop foods “enriched” with beneficial substances and bioactive elements, such as antioxidants, fiber, vitamins, pro-vitamins and minerals. All of these products, very heterogeneous according to their chemical-nutritional composition, are defined as functional food (European Commission, 2010). Therefore, it is difficult to adopt a universal definition of functional food, because of the large and diverse group of food products to which it refers. The definition contained in the European consensus document, drawn from International Life Science Institute in Europe, has been welcomed by the member states: A food can be regarded as functional if it is satisfactorily demonstrated to affect beneficially one or more target functions in the body, beyond adequate nutritional effects in a way that is relevant to either an improved state of health and well-being and/or reduction of risk disease. It is consumed as part of a normal food pattern. It is not a pill, a capsule or any form of dietary supplement. A functional food can be a natural food, a food to which a component has been added, or a food from which a component has been removed by technological or biotechnological means. It can also be a food where the nature of one or more components has been modified, or a food in which the bioavailability of one or more components has been modified, or any combination of these possibilities (Diplock, 1999).

Among the common substances with potential power to prevent specific disease and metabolic dysfunction, there is the lycopene (Arai, 1996), which belongs to the category of the carotenoids, a substance normally present in some foods and in particular in the tomato. A number of studies indicate lycopene among the main natural components capable of inhibiting the proliferation of cancer cells in some of the most common types of cancer (Takeshima et al., 2014; Kaur and Verma, 2015). Present study aims to investigate the effects of two relevant factors, namely, knowledge and food techno-neophobia, on consumers’ willingness to buy food enriched with lycopene. Consumer knowledge, indeed, is a very important factor in the decision-making process. It influences how consumers gather and organize information, and eventually which product they purchase (Alba and Hutchinson, 1987). Several studies indicated information and knowledge as relevant antecedents of functional products consumption The effect was significant either in the case of subjective knowledge (i.e. people’s perceptions of what or how much they know about a product, based on their subjective interpretation) and in the case of objective knowledge (i.e. accurate information about the product, stored in the consumer’s long-term memory, measured with “objective” indicators) (Hilliam, 1996; Verbeke, 2005, 2006; De Magistris et al., 2015). On the other hand, human behavior is also driven by factors which are not related to knowledge, but involve instead the affective level. The diet of human, indeed, is


influenced by a great caution, at times aversion, concerning the new or the unknown (neophobia) (Biltekoff, 2010). Consumer behavior in respect of novel food technologies has been widely documented in the recent literature on food preferences (Pliner and Mann, 2004; Fernández-Ruiz et al., 2013). Consumer behavior evolves over time (Gaviria and Bluemelhuber, 2010): when consumers perceive technology as mature, technophobic attitudes tend to dissolve. Furthermore, the process of consumer acceptance regarding the same food technology could vary widely on a product-byproduct basis, that is, the willingness to try functional foods depends strongly on the specific carrier product (Bech-Larsen and Grunert, 2003; Ares and Gàmbaro, 2007). In recent years, a number of scholars have been interested in understanding and measuring consumers’ attitudes toward modern and new technology (Goldsmith and Hofacker, 1991; Pliner and Hobden, 1992; Eiser et al., 2002; Kirk et al., 2002; Cox et al., 2007; Cox and Evans, 2008; Annunziata and Vecchio, 2013). In the present study, we used the Food Technology Neophobia Scale (FTNS) by Cox and Evans (2008) as a tool for assessing consumers’ attitude toward food technologies, because of its specific focus on technology (Evans et al., 2010; Matin et al., 2012; Verneau et al., 2014; Coppola et al., 2014). The scale includes 13 items, which tap into four thematic areas: usefulness of new food technologies (e.g. “The benefits of new food technologies are often grossly overstated”); perception of risks (e.g. “New food technologies may have long-term negative environmental effects”); healthy choice (e.g. “New products using new food technologies can help people have a balanced diet”); information/media (e.g. “The media usually provides a balanced and unbiased view of new food technologies”). The FTNS was found to be significantly predictive of the willingness to consume food produced by new food technologies (Cox and Evans, 2008). Therefore, the main aim of this work, as anticipated, is to study and compare the effects of knowledge and food techno-neophobia on individuals’ WTP toward functionalized food, specifically crushed tomatoes enriched with lycopene: In our best knowledge, no previous research has been devoted to this specific issue. Moreover, one of the interest of this paper is to analyze the differences which could occur in hypothetical vs real settings. The idea of a systematic discrepancy between declared willingness to perform in a certain way and the actual behavior has a wide tradition in social sciences and common sense. It has been very widely noted that individuals often do not act in accordance with their stated intention (Ajzen, 1991; Ajzen et al., 2004; Lusk et al., 2007). The intention/behavior gap is also observed in the overestimation of WTP in hypothetical compared to real scenarios, that is, the so-called hypothetical bias. In experimental auctions, individuals tend to show higher WTP when the mechanism is hypothetical, and to reduce their WTP in the more demanding real situation (Harrison and Rutström, 2008; Grebitus et al., 2013). Hypothetical and real situations have different psychological status for individuals, thus being influenced by different psychological factors (Ajzen and Sexton, 1999). Therefore, a second aim of our work is to investigate if there is a different effect of knowledge and food technology neophobia on WTP toward functionalized food in hypothetical vs real auctions, which are assumed as proxy variables of intention and behavior, respectively (Ajzen et al., 2004). As far as we know, also this aim has never been pursued before. Materials and methods Participants A total of 100 undergraduates from a large Italian university (50 percent females; Mage ¼ 23.06, SDage ¼ 4.11) participated in the experiment. As regards the net family

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income, the modal class (47 percent) is between 1,000 and 2,000 euros per month, whereas the mean is about 2,400 euros per month. Experimental procedure A total of ten sessions have been conducted, with ten undergraduates involved in each session. During the recruitment stage, participants were not informed about the specific objective of the study. We used an experimental procedure similar to that used by Ajzen et al. (2004): the experiment consisted in a within-subject design with two treatments on two auction payment conditions (hypothetical vs real). The experiment was completely computer based using the software Z-tree (Fischbacher, 2007), for the collection of bids during auctions, and Google Drive to administer the questionnaire. The product chosen for the experiment was a pack of two 400-gram cans of crushed tomatoes. Two different types of crushed tomatoes were used: conventional crushed tomatoes (control product) and a crushed tomatoes with functionalization, enriched with lycopene. For the experiment, the fifth-price mechanism with full bidding process was employed. Currently, a fifth-price auction is considered an incentive-compatible mechanism, more effective in engaging all bidders if the number of participants who could purchase the product is approximately half the session size (Lusk and Shogren, 2007). A full bidding process was used, instead of endowment bidding, to eliminate any aversion to loss and risk exchanging of participants (Lusk and Shogren, 2007; Hellyer et al., 2012). No reference price was used in the auctions since it could increase bid values (Corrigan and Rousu, 2006; Drichoutis et al., 2008; Bernard and He, 2010). Moreover, in order to avoid bid affiliation, no price feedback between multiple rounds was reported (Corrigan et al., 2012). The experimental procedure was the following: (1) In each session, upon arrival the ten students met in the computer laboratory, and received €15 for their participation to the experiment. Each participant was identified with an ID number to guarantee his/her anonymity. (2) Participants were fully briefed on the auction method procedure, and they were informed about the dominant strategy to reveal their true values for the products offered. In order to allow participants to understand bidding behavior and mechanisms, five training rounds were conducted with two different candy bars. (3) Before starting the experimental auction, each participant was invited to inspect both products, using the same conduct that they would take in the event of a purchase at the supermarket. Immediately after, the hypothetical auction took place. During the auction each participant was asked to submit simultaneously a bid for each of the two products (enriched vs not enriched). This step was repeated five times. (4) The experimenter informed participants that a new auction was about to start, with the same mechanism used before, but in this case auctions were real, and the winners were required to buy the products they won. Again, each participant was asked to submit a bid for each of the two products simultaneously, and five rounds were conducted. Then a random draw was made to determine which of the five rounds was binding, and which of the two

products was binding. The top four bidders on the binding product in the binding round purchased the crushed tomato and paid a price equivalent to the fifth highest bid for the product.


(5) Then, participants’ subjective knowledge about lycopene and its properties was measured through a single item (“How much are you aware of the therapeutic properties of lycopene?”). Answers were collected on a scale ranging from 1 (no much) to 7 (a lot).


(6) The FTNS was administered (Cox and Evans, 2008). As already noted, the original instrument is composed by four subscales. The Media subscale was dropped, since it was not very useful to the study purposes, because it does not measures strictly an attitude toward food technology, rather it tap into beliefs about information on food technology (see also Verneau et al., 2014). Therefore, three subscales were administered: (1) FTNS Unnecessary; (2) FTNS Perception of risk; (3) FTNS Healthy choices. Participants indicated their agreement on a scale from 1 to 7. The score of the items of each subscale were averaged; higher scores for each subscale indicated that food technology was evaluated as more unnecessary (α ¼ 0.80), more risky (α ¼ 0.70), and more healthy (α ¼ 0.75), respectively. (7) Finally, data were collected about socio-demographic variables (age, gender, income, number of individuals and teenagers in the family), political orientation, which has been considered a possible predictor of food choices (Onyango et al., 2007), and tomato-related preference and frequency of consuming. Results Table I provides summary statistics of mean and median WTP for each good by treatment. Since the main interest was to investigate the effect of knowledge and food technophobia on the premium price participants were willing to pay, in hypothetical vs real settings, for enriched tomato compared to conventional, a new variable called implicit WTP (Umberger et al., 2002; Rousu and Corrigan, 2008;) was created. This variable is the result of participants’ WTP for the functionalized product minus the WTP declared for the traditional one. Then, to investigate the significance and power of the effect that knowledge and food technophobia had on participants’ premium price, both in hypothetical and real auctions, data of the five rounds of implicit WTP in the hypothetical auctions and of the five rounds of implicit WTP in the real auctions were pooled. Implicit WTP was then Hypothetical auctions Enriched tomato Conventional tomato 1st round 2nd round 3st round 4nd round 5nd round Notes: Entries

1.90 (1.65) 1.98 (1.50) 2.03 (1.55) 2.02 (1.50) 2.11 (1.80) are participants’ mean

Real auctions Enriched tomato Conventional tomato

1.38 (1.20) 1.44 (1.20) 1.44 (1.10) 1.43 (1.15) 1.47 (1.10) WTP (in euro); median

1.78 (1.50) 1.68 (1.40) 1.72 (1.40) 1.81 (1.50) 1.85 (1.45) WTP are reported in

1.27 (1.00) 1.21 (1.00) 1.23 (1.00) 1.28 (1.00) 1.35 (1.00) parentheses

Table I. Summary of mean and median WTP by products and treatment

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regressed on knowledge and technophobia. In addition, in order to test the interactions with the auction payment condition, a dummy variable was added to the model, representing the experimental conditions, and the two-way interactions between this and the other two factors. Socio-demographic measures, political orientation and tomato-related questions were also introduced in the model as control variables. None of them exerted a significant effect (Zs o1; ps W 0.20), therefore they were dropped from the final model, which is as follows: implicitW TP it ¼ aþ b1 real it þ b2 knowi þ b3 f tns1i þ b4 f tns2i þ b5 f tns3i


þ b6 ðreal it knowi Þ þ b7 ðreal it f tns1i Þþ b8 ðreal it f tns2i Þ þ b9 ðreal it f tns3i Þþ ui þ enjt where implicit WTPit is the implicit WTP for the ith participant in the tth bidding round; know the score of the knowledge measure; ftns1 the score of the FTNS unnecessary scale; ftns2 the score of the FTNS risk scale; ftns1 the score of the FTNS healthy choice scale; and real a dummy variable which identifies the auction payment condition (real ¼ 1; hypothetical ¼ 0). Since our data set was built considering all the five rounds, it has been necessary to take into account both the within and between group variability. The former measures the variability in bids of each participant during the five rounds, whereas the latter measures variability in bids among participants (De Groote et al., 2011). Therefore, a model defined by Equation (1) using a GLS random effect regression model was estimated. Results are shown in Table II. The auction payment condition exerted a significant effect on participants WTP: therefore, in the real scenario, the premium price tends to be higher than in the hypothetical one. The effect of knowledge was also significant, with no significant interaction with the auction mechanism. As for the FTNS effect, it was significant only in the case of the healthy choice subscale scores, and the effect was qualified by the significant interaction with the auction payment condition. As shown in Table III, the effect of the healthy choice component of FNTS was significant only in the hypothetical auction. Neither main nor interactive significant effect was found in the case of the scores of other FNTS subscales. Variables

Table II. Random effect GLS regression model

B

SE

Z

p

(Constant) 0.4607 0.4046 1.14 0.255 Auction payment condition (APC) 0.2959 0.1303 2.27 0.023 Knowledge 0.1423 0.0391 3.63 o0.001 FTNS unnecessary −0.1135 0.0990 −1.15 0.252 FTNS risk −0.0985 0.0963 −1.02 0.306 FTNS healthy 0.1974 0.0812 2.43 0.015 Knowledge × APC −0.0129 0.0126 −1.02 0.306 FTNS not necessary × APC −0.0100 0.0319 −0.31 0.753 FTNS risk × APC 0.0401 0.0310 1.29 0.195 FTNS healthy × APC −0.136 0.0261 −5.23 o0.001 Notes: Number of observations ¼ 1,000, number of groups ¼ 100. Dependent variable: implicit WTP


Discussion The aim of this paper was to study the effects of knowledge and food technology neophobia on individuals’ WTP toward functionalized vs conventional tomato in hypothetical vs real auctions. The first interesting result of the experiment was that participants stated, on average, a higher WTP for tomatoes enriched with lycopene than for conventional. Indeed, we found an overall positive premium price of 0.53 euro for enriched tomato, which was not affected by socio-demographic variables, political orientation, and tomato-related questions such as preference and frequency of consuming. As we discussed in the introduction section, consumers’ evaluation of new technologies applied to food products can vary as a function of the type of product. Therefore, it is very important to assess the possible acceptance of a specific functionalization in relation to specific products. Our results suggest that the enrichment of tomatoes with lycopene could receive positive evaluations by consumers. In addition, we also found that the premium price tended to increase in the real auction compared to the hypothetical. Therefore, our study is among those which do not confirm the existence of a statistically significant hypothetical bias between hypothetical and real scenarios (Sinden, 1988). This could also be due to the within-subjects design, because hypothetical bias has been found to be smaller in within-subject design compared to between subjects design (Krawczyk, 2012). As a matter of fact, when participants have been informed about the real possibility to win the auction and buy the product, they became even more interested to the functional attribute of the product than when they were in a hypothetical auction. Hence, it seems that the omnivore’s paradox (Fischler, 1990), that is, the dilemma between the curiosity for novelty (neophilia) and the fear of the unknown (neophobia), in the case of tomato enriched with lycopene tends to be resolved in favor of the curiosity side. The level of participants’ previous knowledge about lycopene exerted a significant positive effect on premium price: individuals with higher previous knowledge tend to offer higher premium price for the healthy attribute. This effect remains stable across auctions condition, that is, knowledge fosters higher premium price both in hypothetical and in real auctions. This suggests that previous knowledge about the specific functionalization of a food product could influence individuals’ intentions to buy that product, and their behavior as well. This also suggest the importance to investigate, through field studies and experimental research, which communication strategy could be more effective in promoting knowledge about functionalized food (Del Giudice et al., in press). As we said, the aspects connected to the fear of novelty and/or food technology do not seem very influential in relation to this specific product and functionalization. This could be due to the principle of compatibility (Ajzen, 2011), according to which “attitudes predict behavior to the extent both are defined at the same level of generality or

B

Hypothetical auction Z

p

B

Real auction Z


p

FNTS healthy choices 0.20 2.43 0.01 0.06 0.74 0.45 Table III. Note: The table shows the conditional marginal effects (delta method) of FNTS Healthy choices scale Conditional marginal effects scores on participants’ WTP over treatments

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specificity in terms of their target, action, context, and time elements” (p. 152). Therefore the FTNS, which measures a general and composite attitude toward food technology, may not have a strong predictive power on the purchase decision of a specifically altered food. Our results mirror this potential problem, except for health subscale. Indeed, among the three subscales of FTNS, only the Healthy choice scores exerted a significant effect on premium price. Moreover, that effect was qualified by the interaction with the auction mechanism, so that participants with higher Healthy choice scores tended to offer higher premium price, but only when the auction was hypothetical. Therefore, it seems that, in this case, the influence of FTNS would be more on the opinion/intention than on behavior. Actually, previous research has clearly shown the predictive power of FTNS on individuals’ intentions, whereas there is a lack of empirical evidence on the link with real behavior (not self-reported). Future studies should be devoted to investigate the influence of food technology neophobia on actual behavior. Future research should also develop our investigation on more heterogeneous samples. Indeed, we choose students – and not consumers – as participants because the experimental design required a good ability to perform computer tasks. In addition, we considered that Depositario et al. (2009) did not find significant differences in the bidding of students and non-students in experimental auctions. However, future research, replicating and extending our findings, could further investigate the power of knowledge measures and FNTS in predicting individuals’ hypothetical and actual WTP. Finally, current study could have major practical implications for firms and industries in the food sector interested to functionalized food. Results show, indeed, an interesting potential for tomato enriched with lycopene, which seems a product not very “scaring” for people, thus with good chance to be strongly appreciated on the market, especially if accompanied by an informative campaign for raising individuals’ knowledge level. References Ajzen, I. (1991), “The theory of planned behavior”, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, Vol. 50 No. 2, pp. 179-211. Ajzen, I. (2011), “Is attitude research incompatible with the compatibility principle?”, in Arkin, R.M. (Ed.), Most Underappreciated, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 151-154. Ajzen, I. and Sexton, J. (1999), “Depth of processing, belief congruence, and attitude-behavior correspondence”, in Chaiken, S. and Trope, Y. (Eds), Dual Process Theories in Social Psychology, Guilford, New York, NY, pp. 117-138. Ajzen, I., Brown, T.C. and Carvajal, F. (2004), “Explaining the discrepancy between intentions and actions: the case of hypothetical bias in contingent valuation”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 30 No. 9, pp. 1108-1121. Alba, J.W. and Hutchinson, J.W. (1987), “Dimensions of consumer expertise”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 411-454. Annunziata, A. and Vecchio, R. (2013), “Consumer perception of functional foods: a conjoint analysis with probiotics”, Food Quality and Preference, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 348-355. Arai, S. (1996), “Studies on functional foods in Japan – state of the art”, Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Biochemistry, Vol. 60 No. 1, pp. 9-15. Ares, G. and Gámbaro, A. (2007), “Influence of gender, age and motives underlying food choice on perceived healthiness and willingness to try functional foods”, Appetite, Vol. 49 No. 1, pp. 148-158.

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Corresponding author Mario Amato can be contacted at: [email protected]

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