Acceptance of Innovative Food Among Tourists: Psychological Factors and Generational Differences in the Post-Transition Context of Serbia

The readiness of tourists to accept innovative food is investigated in this research through the prism of the Protection Motivation Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior, combining two previously developed yet seldom researched psychological dimensions, namely, food neophobia as a restraining force and food involvement as a motivating force. The quantitative approach and the generation-by-generation analysis using partial least squares (PLS-SEM) and multiple group analysis were used to conduct the study on a sample of 985 domestic tourists in Serbia. The results suggest that food involvement eases openness toward gastronomic innovations and mitigates the negative impact of neophobia, whereas the generational differences reveal that younger tourists are more willing to be experimental, and older generations tend to be conservative in their food consumption. The study is relevant to the academic literature because it puts motivational and barrier factors into context within the PMT and TPB paradigms and provides operational implications for the design of tourism propositions that can be used to promote innovative and sustainable gastronomic experiences. The novelty of the present study is that it uses the hybrid model of food neophobia and food involvement in the generational context of a post-transition society, i.e., Serbia.