Consumer attitudes and perceptions towards chilled ready-to-eat foods: a multi-national study.

Understanding consumers' behavior and their handling of high-risk foods at home is essential for reducing the number of foodborne illnesses. This study shows the results of a cross-national analysis of consumers' perception from nine countries, and the identification of customers' clusters and its characteristics in order to understand customers' behavior, and to build safe chilled ready-to-eat (RTE) foods prevention strategies. The cluster analysis resulted in two clusters: (1) "Precautious consumers" characterized by the orientation towards pre-packed RTE foods, with consumers mainly coming from Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey. Their attitudes and self-reported practices may be categorized as less risky in terms of food-borne illnesses connected with the consumption of RTE foods; (2) "Unconcerned consumers" preferred cutting and slicing RTE foods freshly at the point of purchase, usually sold at the delicatessen department in a supermarket or at open markets. Those consumers mostly came from Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia and their attitudes and self-reported practices were riskier. These results allow a better understating of what characterizes consumers of RTE foods in different countries. © Bundesamt für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit (BVL) 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Citation

Nada Smigic, Sibel Ozilgen, Vicente M Gómez-López, Sandra María Osés, Zorana Miloradovic, Biljana Aleksic, Jelena Miocinovic, Sonja Smole Možina, Ajda Kunčič, Raquel Guiné, João Carlos Gonçalves, Joanna Trafialek, Ewa Czarniecka-Skubina, Gunjan Goel, Marijana Blazic, Dora Herljevic, Aleksandra Nikolić, Alen Mujčinović, Ilija Djekic. Consumer attitudes and perceptions towards chilled ready-to-eat foods: a multi-national study. Journal fur Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit = Journal of consumer protection and food safety. 2023;18(2):133-146

PMID: 37265593

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