Assessing Consumer Buy and Pay Preferences for Labeled Food Products with Statistical and Machine Learning Methods

Advancing sustainability in the food and nutrition system: a review of artificial intelligence applications

Promoting sustainability in food and nutrition systems is essential to address the various challenges and trade-offs within the current food system. This imperative is guided by key principles and actionable steps, including enhancing productivity and efficiency, reducing waste, adopting sustainable agricultural practices, improving economic growth and livelihoods, and enhancing resilience at various levels. However, in order to change the current food consumption patterns of the world and move toward sustainable diets, as well as increase productivity in the food production chain, it is necessary to employ the findings and achievements of other sciences. These include the use of artificial intelligence-based technologies. Presented here is a narrative review of possible applications of artificial intelligence in the food production chain that could increase productivity and sustainability. In this study, the most significant roles that artificial intelligence can play in enhancing the productivity and sustainability of the food and nutrition system have been examined in terms of production, processing, distribution, and food consumption. The research revealed that artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science that uses intelligent machines to perform tasks that require human intelligence, can significantly contribute to sustainable food security. Patterns of production, transportation, supply chain, marketing, and food-related applications can all benefit from artificial intelligence. As this review of successful experiences indicates, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data are a boon to the goal of sustainable food security as they enable us to achieve our goals more efficiently.

Analysis of public opinion on food safety in Greater China with big data and machine learning

The Internet contains a wealth of public opinion on food safety, including views on food adulteration, food-borne diseases, agricultural pollution, irregular food distribution, and food production issues. To systematically collect and analyze public opinion on food safety in Greater China, we developed IFoodCloud, which automatically collects data from more than 3,100 public sources. Meanwhile, we constructed sentiment classification models using multiple lexicon-based and machine learning-based algorithms integrated with IFoodCloud that provide an unprecedented rapid means of understanding the public sentiment toward specific food safety incidents. Our best model's F1 score achieved 0.9737, demonstrating its great predictive ability and robustness. Using IFoodCloud, we analyzed public sentiment on food safety in Greater China and the changing trend of public opinion at the early stage of the 2019 Coronavirus Disease pandemic, demonstrating the potential of big data and machine learning for promoting risk communication and decision-making.

The Impact of Consumer Schwartz Values and Regulatory Focus on the Willingness to Pay a Price Premium for Domestic Food Products: Gender Differences

This paper aims to identify which Schwartz values and regulatory focus orientations influence consumer behavior on the food market in the domain of preference for domestic products, which is closely related to consumer ethnocentrism. The CAWI (Computer-Assisted Web Interviews) method was applied. The sample consisting of 1000 respondents was representative for the Polish adult population in terms of sex, age, education, place of living (rural vs. urban), and region. The willingness to pay (WTP) a higher price for domestic products was affected by the tradition and universalism values. Consumer value orientations and regulatory focus were more powerful in explaining the WTP than demographic or socio-economic variables. The theories of value orientations and regulatory focus were found to be more relevant for men than for women, as reflected in adjusted regression determination coefficients. Finally, the promotion regulatory focus was a significant predictor of the WTP among men, but not among women. Based on my findings, it is recommended (1) to emphasize the following elements in marketing communications in order to stimulate the purchases of domestic food products: appeals to tradition, customs, ecology, being natural; (2) to take into account the Schwartz values in consumer segmentation on the food market; (3) to differentiate marketing communications for domestic food products on the basis of gender segmentation: in messages addressed to male consumers, arguments appealing to the promotion orientation should be used more frequently.