Assessing consumer attitudes and perceptions towards food authenticity

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify and assess the factors that consumers evaluate significant in the assessment of food authenticity and guide them to make safe food choices. Design/methodology/approach In this respect, a mixture model for consumer preferences, namely CUB, was employed due to the ability of discriminate features that are rated similarly allowing the detection of significant similarities and differences in consumers' judgments. Moreover, introducing covariates in CUB models allow studying the influence that consumers' socio-demographic characteristics have on the importance of the attributes used in the assessment of food authenticity. Findings The results demonstrate that organic certificate, traditional and homemade production practices, origin certificate as well as information about product's origin country and raw materials production region are significant quality cues enable consumers to judge food authenticity. In addition, consumers further segmentation according to socio-demographic characteristics indicate that country of origin information are mainly used by middle-aged consumers, highly educated and paid, whereas production techniques and organic certification constitute the most effective indicators for judging food authenticity by older consumers. Originality/value The paper confirms that consumers can use extrinsic and intrinsic quality cues to judge food's authenticity.