Assessing the role of organic food supply chain traceability on food safety and consumer wellbeing: A mediated-moderation investigation

Behavioral decision-making of government, agricultural product producers, and consumers on agricultural product quality and safety regulation in a digital environment

The quality and safety of agricultural products are related to people's lives and health, economic development, and social stability, and have always been a hot issue of concern to the government and society. The rapid development of digital traceability technology in the digital environment has brought new opportunities for the supervision of agricultural product quality and safety, but the frequent occurrence of agricultural product safety incidents in recent years has exposed many problems such as the lack of governmental supervision, unstandardized production process of enterprises, and weak consumer awareness. To improve the cooperation efficiency of stakeholders and ensure the quality and safety of agricultural products, this paper proposes a dynamic model based on evolutionary game theory. The model incorporates the government, agricultural product producers, and farmers, and evaluates the stability and effectiveness of the system under different circumstances. The results of the study show that there are multiple evolutionary stabilization strategies in the tripartite evolutionary game model of agricultural product quality and safety supervision, and there are corresponding evolutionary stabilization conditions. There are several factors affecting the stability of the system, the most important of which are government regulation, severe penalties for agricultural product producers, and incentives. When these factors reach a certain threshold, the stakeholder cooperation mechanism can establish an evolutionarily stable strategy. This study contributes to the understanding of the operational mechanism of stakeholder cooperation in agricultural product quality and safety regulation in the digital environment and provides decision support and policy recommendations for stakeholders to promote the sustainable development and optimization of agricultural product quality and safety regulation.

Health-driven mechanism of organic food consumption: A structural equation modelling approach

The COVID-19 pandemic seriously threatened human survival and development. It has also highlighted the significant correlation between ecological and public health. After three years of the COVID pandemic, Chinese consumers have become more aware of the importance of health. Especially in the Internet era, consumers' purchasing methods and health awareness have been changed. Consumers can buy nutritious and organic foods. To understand the impact of consumer psychology and health beliefs on the willingness to purchase organic food in the post-pandemic period, this study uses organic beef as an example and extracts key variables from three basic theories. The three basic theories include the Health Belief Model (HBM), the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), and the Norm Activation Model (NAM), respectively. Specifically, perceived susceptibility and severity are combined to form a health belief variable that can drive organic food purchasing. In contrast, perceived benefit, moral norms, self-efficiency, and controllability are introduced as mediating variables to construct the health driving factors of organic beef purchasing. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and mediation effect tests are used to analyse 539 samples. Meanwhile, paths and mechanisms between health concern and other variables are explored. The results show that health concern is an important driving factor. Health concern can significantly promote the formation of willingness to purchase organic beef. Mediation effect tests suggest that health concern can indirectly affect the willingness to purchase organic beef through perceived benefit, moral norms, and controllability, but the mediation effect of self-efficiency is not significant. This study provides important references for government regulation and certification of organic foods as well as for enterprises'organic food marketing strategies.

The impact of transparent packaging: how transparent packaging for organic foods affects tourists' green purchasing behavior

Previous studies have shown that transparent packaging can influence consumer behavior, but the impact on tourists' environmentally friendly purchase intentions is not well-understood. This study conducted four experiments with 1,513 participants to explore the role of transparent packaging in tourists' willingness to engage in green purchasing. Factors such as ecological concern, nature connectedness, and environmental consequences were also examined. The results showed that transparent packaging significantly enhanced tourists' purchase intentions and that ecological concern, nature connectedness, and environmental consequences had a significant influence on these intentions. These findings contribute to understanding the packaging paradox and its relationship with tourists' green purchasing behavior. The study has implications for the food retail industry and the promotion of sustainable development in scenic areas, suggesting that transparent packaging can effectively enhance tourists' purchase intentions for green products. Understanding factors like ecological concern and nature connectedness can also provide valuable insights for the industry to improve marketing strategies and promote environmentally friendly choices among tourists.

Prospective effects of food safety trust on brand evangelism: a moderated-mediation role of consumer perceived ethicality and brand passion

BACKGROUND

The current study integrates brand management literature with food consumption research and develops an integrative framework by combining food safety trust, consumer perceived ethicality, brand evangelism, and brand passion into a single conceptual model.

METHOD

This quantitative study included 228 ready-to-eat consumers in China using purposive sampling. Data were collected at two periods in time, resulting in a time-lag study in which respondents provided data on independent and moderating variables at time 1 and mediating and dependent variables at time 2 with the same respondents from time 1. The hypothesized correlations were tested using SEM and PROCESS Macro techniques.

RESULTS

According to the findings, trust in food safety has a significant impact on brand evangelism and passion. Furthermore, consumer perceived ethicality (CPE) found to have a substantial moderating role between food safety-FS and brand passion. Moreover, we validated the brand passion role as a mediator between brand evangelism and food safety trust, and investigated whether consumer perceived ethicality conditionally affects the strength of the indirect relationship among food safety trust and brand evangelism through brand passion, indicating a moderated-mediation mechanism.

ORIGINALITY

Drawing on Sternberg theory of love, current study is the first of its kind to evaluate the boundary role as well as the conditional indirect influence of customer perceived ethicality among the study's variables and provides useful information for ready-to-eat food brand managers on how to keep them interested in their risk-free food products.

Knowledgeability about organic food consumption and the factors behind it

Introduction

The popularity of organic food is in increasing trend due to the increased existence of synthetic food worldwide. Hence it is very important to know the knowledge level of city dwellers regarding various aspects of organic food and factors associated with their awareness level.

Objectives

The primary objective of this research study is to develop a standardized knowledge test to assess the knowledge level of respondents regarding organic food and find out the factors behind elevated knowledge levels.

Methods

A standardized knowledge test was developed comprising 26 knowledge items and pilot tested on 42 individuals. Difficulty index, discrimination index and point biserial correlation coefficient were calculated; only 21 knowledge statements were selected out of 26. The reliability coefficient and validity were checked and found satisfactory. The final knowledge test containing 21 knowledge statements was administered to 1050 respondents from various locations of the National Capital Region (NCR)-Delhi, India. After getting the knowledge score from each individual, it was classified as very low, low, medium, high and very high knowledge level. For determining factors contributing towards enhanced knowledge level, the correlation coefficient was calculated between independent socio-economic variables of each individual and their corresponding knowledge score. Regression analysis was also performed and developed a model to depict a relationship between the dependent variable i.e. knowledge level and independent variables.

Results

Standardized knowledge test depicted that a major portion of respondents (62.0%) possessed very low, low and medium levels of knowledge, whereas 23.5 and 14.5% of respondents had high and very high levels of knowledge regarding organic food. Independent variables like gender, education, family size, family income, internet, mass media exposure and social participation had a positive relationship with the knowledge level of respondents. The results of regression analysis show that education (X2), total annual income (X3), gender (X6), participation in various organizations like the club, societies, etc. (X8), health consciousness of individual (X11), perception of organic food (X13); could explain the major share of ~62.1% of the variation in dependent variable i.e. knowledge level.

Conclusion

The developed standardized knowledge test for the present study was found valid and appropriate research tool for evaluating the knowledge level of urban citizens regarding organic food. The majority of respondents had a positive attitude towards organic food but possessed low to medium knowledge levels regarding organic food. Occasional awareness campaigns and capacity-building programs regarding various aspects of organic food in educational institutes, residential societies and through mass media can be beneficial to society.