Consumer attitude towards organic food: determinants of healthy behaviour

The study's main purpose is to determine the factors affecting individuals’ attitudes towards organic products from the perspective of healthy behaviour. The population of the research is people purchasing organic products from sales points in Istanbul province. The data was gathered with a face-to-face questionnaire with 424 people shopping in organic product markets, one of the quantitative research patterns. The data were analysed and interpreted with SPSS and AMOS programs, frequency analysis, descriptive statistics, explanatory factor analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis techniques. The factors were determined by using explanatory factor analysis. The construct validity revealed by the explanatory factor analysis was also verified by the confirmatory factor analysis. Ensuring validity and reliability shows the existence of a structural relationship between the factors affecting the attitudes of consumers towards organic products. According to the explanatory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis results, the factors affecting consumers' attitudes towards organic products are gathered under 5 different dimensions. These dimensions are «consciousness», «price», «inaccessibility», «negative attitude» and «standardization». It is concluded that the Sisli Organic Market is the best-known point. Additionally, it was concluded that the most frequently used sources of information are friends’ advice, and the most preferred organic products are organic vegetables and fruits. Finally, the majority stated that they had paid attention to the organic certificates. With the increasing awareness of healthy life in recent years, individuals have attached great importance to organic products. The study tries to fill the gap in the literature in terms of Turkish consumers' attitudes towards organic product consumption and their sales point preferences. Another originality of the study is that field research has been conducted at the points where organic products are sold

Important Influencing and Decision Factors in Organic Food Purchasing in Hungary

Organic farming is one of the most developed and accepted production systems from the aspect of sustainability. In this study, the Hungarian organic market was segmented on the basis of attitude-relating motivations of organic food purchasing. A descriptive statistic was used for the whole sample, and factor and cluster analysis was applied to segment the organic consumers. A sample of 247 questionnaires was processed to investigate the behavior and characteristics of Hungarian organic food consumers. Our aim was to explore the Hungarian organic consumer market from the aspect of trust in labels, we would like to find answers to the questions “Which kind of information consumers check on the product?” and “What are the main influencing factors of purchase decisions?”. According to our research, the majority of organic food consumers say that color is not as important as taste or freshness, so they do not associate the color of the product with the freshness of the product. Based on the factor analysis, four clusters could be separated that show different shopping motives and differ in their attitude towards food shopping. We named these clusters: Health-conscious, Disappointed, Safe and free food eaters, and Quality-price comparators. Based on the recognized consumer segments, different information should be communicated to consumers so that they can use it in their consumer decisions. Our research suggests that branding or product labeling is not as important to organic food consumers as we previously thought.