Food Scares and Consumer Behaviour: A European Perspective

In this paper a consumer food choice model based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) is extended to account for risk perception and trust. The data are from a nationally representative European survey of 2 725 respondents from five countries, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The model relates the intention to purchase chicken in an extended TPB framework, which incorporates risk perceptions, and trust in alternative sources of food safety information. This model was run for two behaviours of interest: the standard likelihood of intention to purchase and the likelihood of intention to purchase conditional on news about a salmonella incident. The model has good predictive power and shows distinct country differences. Only in the case of a food scare do risk perceptions and trust come into play. The findings suggest that the government policy priority should be on building and maintaining trust in food and health authorities, and research institutions, while food chain actors could eliminate many of the adverse consequences of a food scare if they could build public trust. Interestingly there is no relationship between socio-demographic variables and the trust placed by consumers in food safety information.