Submitted:
03 July 2021
Posted:
05 July 2021
You are already at the latest version
Abstract
Given the increasing public interest in how ingredients are processed and the growing demand for organic food products, it is critical to understand consumers’ expectations about the process-related quality of organic products. Consumers perceive organic food to be nutritious, healthy and either natural or less processed, as they are afraid of the loss of nutrients and other natural properties of the food products. However, emerging food processing technologies might generate healthy and safe food options with nutritional quality properties. Simplified communication schemes might help to overcome this barrier. The main objective of this paper is to propose a working definition of "careful processing" for organic products and test its consistency while being used in scoring different processing methods by consumers. Results show that the proposed definition allows to consistently rate alternative processing methods. Consumers tend to score novel processing methods such as pulsed electric fields and microwave as less careful, supporting the idea that organic consumers want the least man-made interference with their food products. Results show that a simple but effective definition of careful processing may help consumers to distinguish further organic food products from conventional ones, no matter which communication scheme is used.
Keywords:
food processing
; packaging
; UHT
; high-pressure
; pulsed-electric fields
; pasteurization
; mi-cro-wave
; consumer research
; farm-to-fork
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
