Purpose

The study aims to investigate the adoption of green certification programs by restaurants. More specifically, this study has three objectives: to examine the relationships between green certification program scores and customers’ perceptions, duration of green certification and green brand image and food-focused green practices and green brand image.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collected 25,098 TripAdvisor reviews, along with associated patron demographics, for 70 green certified restaurants. To investigate the hypotheses, the authors first used structural topic modeling to discover latent themes relevant to green restaurant practices. Thereafter, the authors used factorial Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) to examine the association between formal certification participation and customers’ green perceptions.

Findings

The results showed that customers were more likely to perceive a green restaurant image after visiting green certified restaurants with higher certification ratings and green certification periods of longer duration.

Practical implications

The current study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, this study uses post-visit online reviews written by customers of certified green restaurants to understand customers’ natural responses more precisely. Second, the study captures the degree of green commitment by applying information about formal certification programs, where other studies have relied on hypothetical scenarios or survey questions to examine the impact of green attributes on customer perceptions.

Originality/value

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the adoption of green certification programs by restaurants empirically with data drawn from actual user-generated content (i.e. TripAdvisor).

中文翻译：

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了解绿色餐厅认证计划与绿色餐厅形象之间的关系：以 TripAdvisor 评论为例

目的

该研究旨在调查餐馆采用绿色认证计划的情况。更具体地说，本研究有三个目标：检查绿色认证计划分数与客户认知、绿色认证持续时间和绿色品牌形象以及以食品为中心的绿色实践和绿色品牌形象之间的关系。

设计/方法/方法

作者收集了 70 家绿色认证餐厅的 25,098 条 TripAdvisor 评论以及相关的顾客人口统计数据。为了调查这些假设，作者首先使用结构主题模型来发现与绿色餐厅实践相关的潜在主题。此后，作者使用协方差的因子多元分析 (MANCOVA) 来检查正式认证参与与客户绿色感知之间的关联。

发现

结果表明，顾客在光顾认证评级较高、绿色认证期限较长的绿色认证餐厅后，更容易感知绿色餐厅形象。

实际影响

目前的研究在几个方面对文献做出了贡献。首先，本研究使用经过认证的绿色餐厅客户撰写的访问后在线评论来更准确地了解客户的自然反应。其次，该研究通过应用有关正式认证计划的信息来捕捉绿色承诺的程度，而其他研究则依赖于假设情景或调查问题来检查绿色属性对客户感知的影响。

原创性/价值

据作者所知，这是第一项调查餐厅采用绿色认证计划的研究，数据来自实际用户生成的内容（即 TripAdvisor）。