Changes in consumer behaviour in the food market in a crisis

Abstract

This article deals with changes in consumer behavior in the food market during a crisis. A crisis can be described as a pandemic during the COVID-19 pandemic, war conflict in Ukraine and a high inflation rate that causes increasing prices of food and other items. All of this affected consumer behaviour in terms of purchasing behaviour and preferences. Consumers changed their behaviour, and we could notice rationality and irrationality in many cases. The research involved 565 respondents in a questionnaire survey conducted in the spring of 2022. The confidence interval at the level of max determined the sample size. +-5% at the significance level α=0.95. The paper presents and examines three hypotheses directly connected with the main aim of the paper. The questionnaire survey provided a solid base for our statistical evaluation, where we used the Mann-Whitney test, Kruskal-Wallis test, Friedman test, Principal component analysis (PCA) and Divisive hierarchical cluster analysis. Research results proved that food design and packaging were among the least important factors when buying food online during a crisis, and younger consumers least avoided the Internet when buying food. Just partially accepted was proven our hypothesis that demographic characteristics (age, gender, place of residence) significantly influenced the importance of factors when buying food via the Internet in times of crisis.