Determinants of consumer preferences towards functional foods with seaweed ingredients

Fraunhofer ISI, together with the Institute for Economic Policy Research at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agricultural Engineering at the University of Bologna, Italy, and Counterpoint (UK) Ltd., London, UK, investigates the factors which influence the market for and the consumer behaviour towards functional food products with ingredients from seaweeds, in order to subsequently develop appropriate consumer communication strategies. The present paper describes the methods and results of a consumer survey carried out in two large EU countries with different market structur es for functional foods (the UK and Italy, the data collection in the third country (Germany) is still ongoing), to determine the most important factors that contribute to the consumers’ attitudes and purchasing behaviour towards functional foods with seaweed ingredients. To identify the most important potential factors of consumer behaviour and to supplement the literature analysis, focus groups with consumers were carried out in Germany and the UK. Issues discussed there were the relationship of food consumption and health, functional foods as well as seaweed as source of food ingredients. On this basis, a mall intercept survey is organised in order to verify consumer preferences towards a limited set of selected attributes, also including health-related properties. A conjoint design was developed including six dimensions with two or three factorial levels each. A fractional orthogonal design with 19 product profiles is presented to the respondents, asking them to rank the profiles according to their preference. A short self-administered questionnaire completes the data collection. Data are collected in or directly in front of supermarkets, participants are recruited from the customers which have just purchased foods in order to reach those persons who are responsible for buying foods for the household. Different sampling points per country are used to increase the variability in the socio-demographic background of the participants. The analysis is based on nU=200 cases from the UK and nI=235 from Italy. The results show that the general acceptance for foods with seaweed ingredients is unexpectedly high. The conjoint analysis reveals the importance of information concerning food products with ingredients from seaweeds, and an unexpectedly low relevance of the price as well as of the claimed health effect. This lack of information is stressed by a relatively large group of persons who – according to their answers in the questionnaire – have no clear-cut opinion about seaweed ingredients for foods, although many of them have bought other functional foods throughout the last year.