Jessica Aschemann-WitzelAarhus University | AU · Centre for Research on Customer Relations in the Food Sector MAPP
Jessica Aschemann-Witzel
Dr. agr.
About
147
Publications
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Introduction
Consumer behaviour and marketing in the food sector, both from a commercial and public policy side, in particular with regard to health and sustainability.
Publications
Publications (147)
Purpose
– The aim of this paper is to study the extent of change in parents' fruit and vegetable consumption during a period when their children participate in a school-based healthy eating intervention.
Design/methodology/approach
– A total of 256 12-year-old Danish schoolchildren took part in a text-message feedback intervention promoting fruit...
The future of plant-based diets is a complex public health issue inextricably linked to planetary health. Shifting the world's population to consume nutrient-rich, plant-based diets is among the most impactful strategies to transition to sustainable food systems to feed 10 billion people by 2050. This review summarizes how international expert bodi...
The success of innovations hinges on the relevant stakeholders' perceptions. While the success of some innovations—for example, those related to consumer products—often depends on only one stakeholder, the buyer, the success of other innovations, such as renewable energy sources, depends on multiple stakeholders. The traditional trend of focusing o...
Humanity needs food system sustainability transitions to align future food demand with the planetary boundaries. This requires stakeholders and organisations to react to each other to change their position, strategies and practices. On the basis of niche-regime interactions in sustainability transitions, we explore the case of Denmark's plant-based...
Background:
Childhood obesity rates have been rapidly increasing worldwide. Several actions to reduce this trend have addressed maternal feeding practices. However, research reports an unwillingness to taste healthful foods expressed by children and fathers, which represents a major obstacle to a healthy diet in the family household. The present s...
Objectives
This study aims to propose and evaluate a theory-driven questionnaire addressing barriers to healthy eating among mothers of young children.
Methods
Statements drawing upon the Social Cognitive Theory were developed/gathered based on literature review and previous qualitative research. Part I (43 items) included general barriers, attitu...
Agrivoltaics is a dual land-use approach, combining food and energy production. It is a yet underexplored innovation with high potential to address land-use conflicts. Understanding the basis on which stakeholders judge and decide on such innovations is crucial to understanding perception and adoption, especially when the potential value of an inno...
The prevalence of childhood obesity has increased at an alarming rate despite several actions to reverse this trend. It is important to focus on tackling the constraints for healthy food provisioning. We focus on identifying segments of mothers in relation to factors acting as barriers to healthy eating. Five hundred mothers in each country (Argent...
Supermarkets have been criticized by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for pricing tactics that trigger overpurchase, which may subsequently lead to food waste. Some retailers have responded by abolishing price promotions. However, is it the macro‐level of the market structure, or the micro‐level of the consumer, that is to blame for food waste?...
Effective interfaces of knowledge and policy are critical for food system transformation. Here, an expert group assembled to explore research needs towards a safe and just food system put forward principles to guide relations between society, science, knowledge, policy and politics.
Future sustainable food systems should more efficiently use natural resources and reduce food waste. Upcycled food – foods elevated in value through ingredients otherwise wasted or previously thought inedible – constitutes a new approach contributing to this much needed transition. Successful market launches of such foods requires favourable consum...
Imports are necessary to satisfy consumer demand for a varied organic food assortment. In developed economies, consumers generally prefer domestic products, while consumers in developing and emerging economies tend to prefer imported. Underlying reasons for these organic food preferences are explored in an emerging and a developed economy, China an...
Significant reductions in household food waste have been regarded as a key step towards achieving global sustainable development. Household food waste is a complex phenomenon determined by consumer behavior along the steps of the “food journey” that goes from purchasing to final disposal. Although avoiding food waste is socially desirable and raise...
Studies about fathers and feeding are scarce and little is known about predictors of parental involvement in child feeding and of paternal feeding practices. Therefore, this study aimed to examine possible differences between Danish mothers and fathers with regard to their feeding practices and involvement in feeding related tasks, and to assess po...
COVID-19 has impacted research worldwide, with many researchers turning to online methods. While online and co-creation research methods are well established, there are no instructional articles or guides for researchers aiming to conduct online co-creation workshops. Such workshops can provide quality data and are increasingly used. This methods p...
Household food waste is a major sustainability problem to solve. Smart labels can alleviate the contributing factor of incorrect interpretation of expiration date labels. However, so far little research has studied consumer handling practices and perceptions of such labels in the context of use. We address this through a qualitative, asynchronous a...
Agriculture and food science literature on waste-to-value applications that allow upcycling of by-product ingredients is increasing. However, this stream of research rarely takes an international trade and sustainability systems perspective. This focused review defines the term of waste-to-value and the sustainable development goals connected to it...
How to enable more widespread sustainable food choice and diets is an unresolved challenge. A consumer-friendly sustainability labelling scheme ‘holistically’ encompassing all sustainability aspects ‘in one’ might be a way forward, but this idea entails both opportunities and challenges, not least given that this requires a common understanding of...
The growing rates of childhood obesity constitute a public health challenge worldwide. Therefore it is important to identify effective and widely applicable interventions to prevent it. This study aims to explore children's experience of using a newly developed smartphone application (app) designed to promote healthy eating and evaluate its efficac...
A sustainable bio-economy requires that by-products and side-streams in agricultural and food production are reinserted into the value cycle, a concept also called valorisation or upcycling. The concept constitutes an important sustainability-oriented innovation practice contributing to waste reduction and efficient resource use. However, while the...
Although considerable research has been done on the role of a health goal in food choices, little effort is devoted to the contexts intervening between the health goal and choices and its relationship with taste and price in the congruent non-conflicting versus the incongruent conflicting choice context. The present research experimentally examined...
Sustainability problems often seem intractable. One reason for this is due to difficulties coordinating actors’ efforts to address socially responsible outcomes. Drawing on theories of bounded ethicality and incorporating work on communicating shared values in coordinating action this paper outlines the lack coordination as a matching issue, one co...
Communication campaigns are expected to contribute to increase the efficacy of nutritional warnings. In this context, the aims of the present work were (a) to evaluate how citizens perceive different types of messages for a communication campaign and (b) to determine if personal characteristics such as gender, age, and educational level, as well so...
Supermarkets receive criticism for irresponsible marketing practices, such as price promotions, that trigger over-purchasing and seemingly contribute to consumer waste. In the wake of this, retailers have abolished certain price promotions as part of an effort to meet corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals. We aim to investigate whether the un...
Adapting responsible food marketing practices to different customer types can make a valuable contribution to reducing food waste. The current study investigated the relation between food (waste)-related lifestyle patterns and self-reported food waste, choices for suboptimal food, and food waste awareness using a survey with 4214 consumers across f...
Three key transitions leading to a “safe and just” operating space, with a focus on food systems, emerged during the development of a Foresight study promoted by SCAR (Standing Committee on Agricultural Research1): (a) sustainable and healthy diets for all; (b) full circularity in the use of resources; (c) diversity as a key component of stable sys...
Background
Consumers' possibility of connecting to the surrounding world has rapidly increased the use of interactive communication technologies in their daily lives. This constitutes a major trend in the food sector, which is worth investigating in order to improve the understanding of the influence of the technologies on consumers' value creation...
Food suboptimality is one of the major driving factors of food waste at the consumer level. Consumer decision to purchase a suboptimal food strongly depends on the associations raised by the suboptimality. In this context, the aim of the current study was to study the influence of different types of suboptimality on consumer associations, emotional...
Introduction
Meanings and practices attributed to sugar emerged as important barriers to healthy eating in an earlier study with French and Danish parents. Considering the impact of excessive sugar intake on human health and childhood obesity, this study focuses on gaining further understanding of connotations, perceptions and attitudes related to...
Purpose
This paper aims to test the general validity of a hierarchical model of country image conceptualizations across countries that differ in socio-economic development and distance to the exporting country.
Design/methodology/approach
Representative consumer samples in Germany, France, China and Thailand ( N ∼ 1,000 per country) completed an o...
This study investigated the effect of hunger on consumers’ visual attention during a food choice task, and the role of time orientation (i.e., present and future orientation) in this interplay. A lab-based eye-tracking experiment including 102 participants was conducted, with hunger as the manipulated factor (hungry, satiated). Participants in the...
The food sector is increasingly turning toward sustainability issues. A sustainable food system should provide sufficient, nutritious food for all within limited natural resources. Plant-based food and proteins are a recent, growing trend setting out to contribute to this challenge. However, food industry stakeholders need to be aware of the challe...
Alarming childhood obesity rates call for research into the factors that influence a child's environment. Although parents have a large influence on children's eating behaviours, surprisingly little research has explored parental healthy eating patterns. We conducted face-to-face interviews with parents of young children (up to 4 years old) living...
Objective
To explore the specific type of messages people consider most appropriate for a mass communication campaign aimed to promote healthy eating in the context of the implementation of nutritional warnings.
Design
Online study including multiple-choice and open-ended questions.
Setting
Uruguay, 1 of the Latin American countries with the high...
The sustainability agenda requires greater resource efficiency and a more circular economy. There are new technologies that allow value increase through upcycling and waste-to-value production. However, they come at a cost to businesses, which consumers are not necessarily willing to cover. This leads to the question of the right degree and type of...
Food waste is a major barrier to a sustainable society. Cleaner production is most effectively approached by amongst others avoiding waste. A lot of food waste is due to consumer perception of sub-optimality of foods, and supermarkets can offer ‘imperfect’ products to consumers at a reduced price in order to fight food waste. However, little is kno...
Studies on food waste can roughly be grouped into three streams of research. The first looks into the structure and type of food loss and waste (what type of food is wasted, and where and to which extent in the supply chain?), while the second explores the causes of food waste and why it occurs (why food is wasted, and which factors and situations...
The past decades have seen the development of a multitude of sustainability-related food labels aimed at reducing the existing information asymmetry between food practitioners and consumers regarding the sustainability impact on the food supply chain. Sustainability-related food labels can correct market failures and contribute to a more sustainabl...
The inclusion of sodium warnings on food packages has been proposed as a means to encourage population to reduce sodium intake. However, consumers who focus on today rather than tomorrow or consumers who downplay or underestimate risks might pay little attention to warnings. The aim of the present study was to explore whether time orientation and p...
A primary cause of food waste in households is a lack of food capabilities. Yet, the antecedents of food capabilities and its relationship with causes of food waste across different situational contexts remain poorly understood. We apply self‐efficacy theory in combination with convenience orientation and good provider identity in a mixed‐methods s...
Nutritional warnings are intended to enable citizens to make informed choice by clearly identifying food products with excessive content of nutrients associated with noncommunicable diseases. The efficacy of this public policy is expected to improve if accompanied by communication campaigns that raise awareness of the existence of nutritional warni...
One approach to tackling the imminent sustainability problem of food waste is to sell suboptimal food which otherwise might be wasted. However, understanding how the action of buying price-reduced suboptimal food is influenced by the fact that the consumer purchases it publicly while observed by others is yet unexplored. The present research invest...
Objective
To evaluate the impact of message framing on attitudes towards messages aimed at promoting the use of nutritional warnings, behavioural intention and actual behaviour, evaluated through visual attention to nutritional warnings and the choice of a snack product during a real choice task.
Design
Following a between-subjects design, partici...
Food stores have begun to tackle food waste at the point of sale. They do so by selling ‘suboptimal’ food before it is wasted, typically with a price reduction. However, efficiency of this food waste avoidance action can be improved by knowing for which product category, which store type, which accompanying communication, and which consumer charact...
A major share of food waste is caused in consumer households. Globally, this share is expected to increase with growing middle classes in emerging countries. Consumer behaviour factors causing food waste differ across the various food handling stages from purchase to use, as well as for the individual and the specific situation in question. In orde...
Consumers in the ‘clean label’ trend are increasingly interested in knowing the ingredients of their food. There is also an emerging demand for more and diverse protein products as well as a trend towards plant-based foods. Food manufacturers consider reformulation of the ingredient lists of their products or innovation of new food products answeri...
In the light of the sustainability challenge ahead, the food sector has to become more resource efficient. This includes moving towards a circularity approach in which by-products from production side-streams are re-inserted into the food chain. However, it is unclear how consumers react to food products based on ingredients previously wasted in th...
Nutritional warnings have been recently introduced as a new front-of-pack nutrition labelling scheme. Its particular goal is to facilitate the identification of products with excessive content of nutrients, given these are associated with non-communicable diseases. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the influence of nutritional warnings o...
Background: Humanity's current use of resources is not in line with the goal of sustainable development. Climate change impact scenarios appear worryingly pessimistic. The agricultural and food production accounts for a particularly high share of the impact, and this also holds for consumption of food. Transforming food consumption plays a crucial...
Food producers respond to the current consumer trend of clean label products and reducing meat consumption by increasingly offering plant-based food products and transparent, understandable ingredient lists. However, consumer interest can be driven by various motives and food producers face the challenge of identifying the most effective motive to...
Purpose
The increased acknowledgement of the problems associated with food waste has triggered a number of social and commercial initiatives for the re-distribution of suboptimal foods (SOFs). This paper aims to explore a variety of such initiatives and discuss their prospects, considering the commercial contingencies of the food supply system.
D...
The effects of organics and country of origin (COO) on consumers’ food choices have mostly been investigated separately. In order to investigate the joint effect of these two credence quality cues and when they influence choice, a choice-based conjoint (CBC) experiment was conducted in Germany, France, Denmark, China and Thailand. In each country,...
Objective
Nutritional warnings have recently been suggested as a simplified front-of-pack nutrition labelling scheme to facilitate citizens’ ability to identify unhealthful products and discourage their consumption. However, citizens’ perspective on this policy is still under-researched. The objective of the present work was to study how citizens p...
Country-of-origin (COO) effects and consumer evaluation of organic food products are rarely studied in combination. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate organic consumers' preferences for imported organic food products from different origins and the underlying reasons for these preferences, including how consumers' COO preferences dep...
Consumer households and consumer behavior have been identified as the major cause of food waste in the supply chain. Food marketing might offer products and services that help consumers to reduce their food waste or reduce the consumer-related food waste at the consumer–retailer interface. However, such strategies require consumer acceptance and ta...
Consumers are said to increasingly assess processed food in terms of whether or not they perceive it to be ‘clean label’ food. This term refers to what is seen as little processed and ‘natural’ or ‘free from’ negatively associated ingredients. However, it is difficult for food producers to predict how the product ingredients will be perceived, and...
Consumers’ perceptions of the quality of fresh produce at the point of purchase and point of consumption play an important role in decisions about what to buy, eat and discard. Apple images were used to assess the extent that defects (bruising, splitting, and crushing) attracted consumers’ visual attention as measured using eye tracking and related...
The inclusion of more attention-grabbing and easily interpretable front-of-pack (FOP) nutrition information is one of the public policies that can be implemented to empower consumers to identify unhealthful food products and to make more informed food choices. The aim of the present work was to evaluate the influence of two FOP nutrition labelling...
The complex causes of consumer food waste make it difficult for commercial actors and public policy makers to develop successful foodwaste reduction campaigns. One of the essential problems is that consumer food waste seems to be the unplanned result of divergent food-related behaviors. The current research investigates the relationship between dis...
Objective:
To evaluate how information about low nutrient content included in the traffic light labeling system influences consumers' perception of the healthfulness of products with high content of 1 key nutrient, and to compare the traffic light system with warnings in terms of the perception of healthfulness.
Design:
Images of front-of-pack (...
The extent of food waste raises concern about its effect on natural resource use, food security and future sustainability of the international food sector. It is expected that emerging countries with a growing middle class will exhibit a similar extent and pattern of consumer-related food waste, which is disturbing given that food waste coexists wi...
The reformulation of the food products available in the marketplace to improve their nutritional quality has been identified as one of the most cost-effective policies for controlling the global obesity pandemic. Front-of-pack (FOP) nutrition labelling is one of the strategies that has been suggested to encourage the food industry to reformulate th...
Different interpretative front-of-pack (FOP) nutrition labelling schemes have recently been implemented in several countries but it is still unclear which is the most effective. The present work compared three interpretative schemes (Nutri-score, health star rating and nutritional warnings) in terms of attentional capture, processing time, influenc...
Objective
The current study aimed to assess Uruguayan consumers’ accounts of their own need to change their dietary patterns, their intended changes and the barriers related to doing so, and to compare the intentions and barriers with the recommendations of the national dietary guidelines.
Design
An online survey with 2381 Uruguayan employed adult...
Food not purchased due to its perceived sub-optimality is often wasted in the store, which contributes to the problem of food waste. One way to avoid this factor causing disposal of edible food is to offer such foods at reduced prices in the store. However, it remains under researched under which circumstances consumers most likely choose such food...
Consumers have been found to majorly prefer ‘optimal’ food over ‘suboptimal’ when purchasing food. To provide an incentive for consumers to select suboptimal food and thus decrease food waste in the supply chain, expiration date based pricing is suggested and increasingly applied. However, it is unclear which contextual, individual, and product-rel...
Failure to translate intentions into actual behaviour is known in many areas of human action. The intention to consume more sustainable is no exception and often fails to be translated into behaviour. Behavioural research emphasized the use of nudges as one of the remedies to ensure that most of the people's daily choices on what to buy or what to...
Medicinal research is exploring an increasing number of botanical substances with potentially favorable health effects, amongst others resveratrol. For marketing botanicals in consumer products, it needs to be determined which food products consumers prefer as a carrier and what kind of communication they react most favorably to. An online survey a...
Nutritional warnings have been recently proposed as an interpretative front-of-package nutrition labelling scheme to highlight unhealthful products. This scheme is particularly relevant in food markets characterized by a high availability of processed products with unfavourable nutrient profile. However, it remains unclear to what extent, how and u...
An in-depth understanding of the citizen's perception and behavior is needed for the development of targeted public policies and interventions that can successfully encourage people to shift their dietary patterns and contribute to the prevention of non-communicable diseases. The present work aimed to identify barriers and facilitators for the adop...
Consumers are directly and indirectly responsible for a significant fraction of food waste which, for a large part, could be avoided if they were willing to accept food that is suboptimal, i.e., food that deviates in sensory characteristics (odd shape, discoloration), or that has a best-before date which is approaching or has passed, but that is st...
Food waste accounts for a considerable share of the environmental impact of the food sector. Therefore, strategies that aim to reduce food waste have great potential to improve sustainability of the agricultural and food supply chains. Consumer-related food waste is a complex issue that needs collaboration between various supply chain actors and se...
Food waste has received increasing scientific and societal attention during the last decade. One important cause of food waste is thought to be the un-willingness of supply chains and consumers to sell, purchase, and consume suboptimal or imperfect foods. Yet, empirical research on this issue is scarce and contradictory. The current research invest...
Support for organic farming is a promising policy for improving sustainability in the food sector. Further consumer demand, however, is hindered by high prices. We review research from 2000 to 2014 on the role of perceived price, income, price knowledge, willingness to pay, and reactions to price changes on organic food. We find that price is the m...
Consumers in industrialized countries are nowadays much more interested in information about the production methods and components of the food products that they eat, than they had been 50 years ago. Some production methods are perceived as less “natural” (i.e. conventional agriculture) while some food components are seen as “unhealthy” and “unfami...
Food waste occurs throughout the entire food supply chain, from production to consumption of food in households. Retailers are in a unique position to contribute to food waste avoidance, not only by minimizing the amount of waste in their distribution channels but also by influencing consumer attitudes and behaviors. This explorative study aims to...
To combat food waste, supermarkets offer food items at a reduced price in-store when they are close to the expiration date or perceived as suboptimal. It is yet unknown, however, which considerations consumers engage in when deciding about the offer, and whether focusing particularly on the price during food purchase might be related to greater foo...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on the country-of-origin (COO) effect in the context of organic food and develop suggestions for further research in this area. Research has investigated COO effects and consumer responses to organic food, but there is little research on the combination of the two.
Design/methodology/ap...