The impact of innovation-related perception on consumer acceptance of food innovations – Development of an integrated framework of the consumer acceptance process

Highlights

• Development of a new conception of consumer acceptance of food innovations.

• Several antecedent factors of innovation-related perception were identified.

• PSL-SEM was used for the empirical tests of the developed model.

• Relative advantage, naturalness, and trust affect innovation-related perception.

• Value, risk, & innovation-related perception are drivers of consumer acceptance.

Abstract

Innovations are an important part of the further advancement of societies in general as well as of companies in particular. Individuals can benefit from the advantages of innovations, while companies can maintain or increase their market share and profitability. However, especially in the food sector, scientific or technological innovations often encounter mistrust and rejecting reactions from consumers, resulting in decreasing acceptance of those innovations. Therefore, this paper aims to gain a deeper comprehension of consumer acceptance of innovative food products as well as to identify antecedent factors of innovation-related perception. For the empirical investigation of our conceptualized model, an online survey was conducted in Germany (n = 617) and the collected data were analyzed through structural equation modeling. The results confirmed a high predictive power of the multi-dimensional model of consumer acceptance. Our first major finding indicates that relative advantage, naturalness, novelty, and discomfort are the most important driving factors of the innovation-related perception of food products. Further important findings show that innovation-related perception has a strong positive and highly significant impact on customer perceived value, respectively a strong negative and highly significant impact on the customer perceived risk. In summary, innovation-related perception, customer perceived value, as well as customer perceived risk, are all important variables related to the acceptance of an innovative food product. The food sector can benefit from the insights provided by this study to communicate and market their products accordingly to the results to reduce mistrust and increase acceptance of food innovations on the consumer side.

Introduction

Across sectors, it is essential for future-oriented companies to successfully develop and introduce new products to the market (Kühne, Vanhonacker, Gellynck, & Verbeke, 2010). In order to develop new products, companies can fall back on scientific and technological innovations of various domains (Ronteltap, Van Trijp, Renes, & Frewer, 2007). Consumers have adopted many of these technology-based innovations easily whereas other innovations have met with substantial resistance (Ronteltap et al., 2007). Within the food area a similar picture emerges, with some recent technology-based innovations receiving high levels of consumer acceptance (e.g. nutraceuticals or fortified, enriched or enhanced functional foods), and others essentially being rejected by consumers (e.g., genetically modified foods in Europe) (Cardello, 2003, Gaskell et al., 2010, Vanhonacker et al., 2013). Especially, when an innovative food product has been produced by a more or less unfamiliar technology, consumers are often highly skeptical about that product and perceive great consumption risks (Chaudhry et al., 2010). Even though the production of food has never been safer in the Western world and developed countries, consumers of those societies are increasingly uncertain about the safety and quality of food (Bánáti, 2011). This increasing mistrust of consumers toward the food chain led to a decreasing acceptance and boycott of regular and newly developed products (e.g., Shepherd, 2008). From an expert point of view, these behavior patterns appear irrational and inconsistent with expert opinions and scientific knowledge (Verbeke, Frewer, Scholderer, & De Brabander, 2007). Experts are usually more open to innovative food technologies, as they appreciate the many benefits of using the innovation, such as improved food quality or simplified food production processes, more than the small uncertainties related to potentially detrimental effects of the technology (Bearth & Siegrist, 2016). Among other reasons, the disparity between experts’ and laypeople’s perception is the result of different appraisal strategies (e.g., heuristics, mental shortcuts) and the different resources available to them (Hansen et al., 2003, Kahneman and Tversky, 1979, Krystallis et al., 2007, Tversky and Kahneman, 1992). Therefore, it is necessary for the successful and sustainable introduction of innovative food products to have a good understanding of consumers’ perceptions and expectations towards innovations in food products (Grunert et al., 2011, Linnemann et al., 2006).

A number of studies demonstrated that perceived risks and perceived benefits are major determinants of consumer acceptance of new food technologies (e.g., Gupta et al., 2012, Bredahl, 2001, Ronteltap et al., 2007). The trade-off between individual costs and benefits of an innovation is a crucial element in attitudinal models of innovation acceptance, as it contributes to the relevant attitudes, which determine consumer acceptance or rejection (Frewer, 2003). Nevertheless, the determining factors of consumer acceptance of innovative food products cannot be reduced to these two factors (Siegrist, 2008). According to Siegrist (2008), one key driver for a high consumer acceptance of food innovations is the consumer perception of the properties of those food innovations, which significantly influences the perceived risk as well as perceived benefit of innovative food products. Besides intrinsic sensory properties of the product, consumer’s perception of food depends also largely on a variety of factors that are extrinsic to the product (Cardello, 2003). Over the past several years, numerous studies have identified several extrinsic factors that affect the perception of innovative food products (e.g., Amin et al., 2011, Connor and Siegrist, 2010, Siegrist, 2008, Stampfli et al., 2010, Verbeke, 2005). These factors can be distinguished between features of the innovation to be adopted (e.g., innovativeness or naturalness), of the prospective consumer potentially adopting it (e.g., knowledge or moral concerns), and the social system in which the innovation is introduced (e.g., social trust) (Ronteltap et al., 2007). However, most previous studies have only considered certain factors that affect the perception and acceptance of (innovative) food products (e.g., knowledge and health expectations (Connor and Siegrist, 2010, Verbeke, 2005), or trust in science and regulation (Bearth et al., 2014, Zhang et al., 2018)). In order to understand the acceptance of and the intention to buy food products that are new on the market to its full extent, it is necessary to consider the perception of the innovative product with all its extrinsic determinants, as the consumer decision is also made based on these determinants (Grunert et al., 2011).

Against that background, the objectives of the present study were to identify extrinsic determinants of the consumer perception of innovative food products in a first step and, subsequently, to understand the consumer acceptance toward a technology-based food innovation in all its stages.

Therefore, a new multifaceted model of innovation-related perception regarding food products combined with a process of consumer acceptance is developed and empirically tested. We used an innovative taste enhancer, which strengthens the taste of salt, in combination with cheese as a case for our exploratory study that was conducted in Germany. To determine the derivated dependencies of the different dimensions of the consumer acceptance process (i.e. innovation-related perception, customer perceived value and risk, attitude components, implementation, and confirmation), we used structural equation modeling. Knowing about the factors that have an impact on consumer acceptance as well as the dynamic process that leads to acceptance of food-related innovations enables marketing managers to develop marketing concepts and communication material that decrease consumers’ uncertainty and skepticism and increase their acceptance of innovative food technologies and product innovations.