Purpose

When selecting manufactured foods, customers consider several product features. Given the contemporary trends of food consumption, the purpose of this paper is to determine the influence that some demographic and psychographic key variables have on the chances of a consumer belonging to a market segment characterised by health-related food preferences.

Design/methodology/approach

The food choice scale is revised to develop a multidimensional measure of the factors underlying consumer food choices. Data of 288 sampled consumers were used to validate the scale and to group consumers into four segments based on the value assigned to several food-product meta-attributes. Depending on these food choice values, the study identified four dissimilar clusters: utilitarian, protecting, toning and highly demanding.

Findings

Consumers use multiple attributes when choosing food products. However, emerging segments tend to prefer health-related attributes over utilitarian or conventional attributes, such as price, flavour or accessibility. The consumers of these segments tend to be older, more health conscious and more prone to psychological health risks.

Originality/value

Demographic and psychographic traits tend to drive trade-offs between health- and non-health-related attributes when considering food products. Several multivariate methodologies were innovatively coupled to characterize consumers based on their healthy food preferences and individual traits.

中文翻译：

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谁真正重视健康食品？

目的

在选择制成食品时，客户会考虑几种产品功能。考虑到当代食品消费趋势，本文的目的是确定某些人口统计学和心理因素对消费者属于以健康相关食品为特征的细分市场的机会的影响。

设计/方法/方法

修订了食品选择量表，以开发对消费者食品选择基础因素的多维测量。使用288个样本消费者的数据来验证量表，并根据分配给几个食品产品元属性的值将消费者分为四个部分。根据这些食物选择的价值，研究确定了四个不同的类别：功利性，保护性，色调和高要求。

发现

消费者在选择食品时会使用多种属性。但是，相对于功利或常规属性（例如价格，风味或可及性），新兴市场群体倾向于偏爱健康相关属性。这些细分市场的消费者年龄较大，对健康的意识更强，更容易产生心理健康风险。

创意/价值

在考虑食品时，人口统计和心理特征倾向于在健康和非健康相关属性之间进行权衡。创新地结合了多种多元方法，以根据消费者的健康食品偏好和个人特征来表征消费者。