Involvement, competencies, gender and food health information seeking

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the role of gender, food health involvement, and food health information competency in predicting consumer food health information seeking.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual model for predicting consumer food health information seeking is proposed. The predicting constructs are general food health involvement, general food health competency, product‐specific health involvement, and product‐specific food health competency. The relationships between construct are estimated using structural equation modelling. Data were collected in a nationally representative consumer‐panel among 504 Danish consumers using a questionnaire.FindingsThe results suggest that improving consumers' general food health involvement may only lead to increased product‐specific health information seeking if consumers at the same time are involved in the specific product category. The results also revealed that women are generally more food health involved than men but did not support previous research suggesting that women also are more knowledgeable about healthy food and that they more often seek product‐specific food health‐related information.Research limitations/implicationsThis research concentrated on analysing one food product, salad dressing. A large cross‐section of products ought to be studied to improve the generalizability of the obtained result and thus future research may wish to incorporate a wider range of food products.Practical implicationsThe results suggest that food authorities and/or food marketers seeking to promote a healthy life‐style should consider providing examples of healthy product categories (food authorities) and/or particular products (food marketers) along with their general health information.Originality/valueThis paper empirically investigates gender along with a number of mental constructs for the purpose of understanding consumers' food health information seeking. Also, the paper explores age and educational level as possible moderating variables of the consumer food health information seeking process.