Determinants of sustainable food consumption behavior through environmental awareness, health consciousness, economic factors and policy interventions

The study aims to find out if there are any links between sustainable food consumption behaviour and the environment, health, economy and policy related factors and if the combination of these factors could explain more of the food consumption behaviour than any individual one. The study was a cross-sectional survey of 300 adult consumers with responsibility for food purchasing in the household completed through a structured and self-administered questionnaire. IBM SPSS Statistics was used for reliability, descriptive, correlation and multiple regression analyses. All four hypothesized factors were positive and significantly related with SFSB and the combined model accounted for a significantly greater proportion of variance than any single factor alone. In the combined model, environmental awareness had the highest standardised weight and the single strongest standalone model was health consciousness (the paper does not pretend that the two are contradictory). Cross sectional, self-reported, single source design precludes causal inferences, common method bias has not been evaluated, constructs of underlying behavioural theories were not measured directly and measurement model has yet to be validated with confirmatory factor analysis. These restrictions are explained in detail and are to be read in conjunction with the findings. The results suggest interventions that emphasize affordability and accessibility, credible communication about sustainability and health and sustainability co-branding as potential levers, which, however, need to be confirmed in a more stringently designed study. The paper combines four distinct research areas on the sustainable consumptions in an empirical model and reports the complete analytical detail necessary for replication and critical evaluation.