Acceptance of insects as food in Germany: Is it about sensation seeking, sustainability consciousness, or food disgust?
By P. Lammers, Liza Marleen Ullmann, Florian Fiebelkorn. Food Quality and Preference, 2019
193 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract This study examines the acceptance of insect-based foods by consumers in Germany. The nationwide online survey (N = 516) focused on which factors have the greatest influence on the willingness to consume an insect burger and buffalo worms. In addition to sociodemographic factors, meat consumption and the “classical” variables in the field of entomophagy (familiarity, previous insect consumption, food technology neophobia and food neophobia), the study focuses in particular on the previously unconsidered variables sensation seeking, sustainability consciousness and food disgust. A total of 41.9% of the participants were willing to consume an insect burger. In contrast, only 15.9% of the participants were willing to consume the buffalo worms – a principal ingredient of the insect burger. Hierarchical multiple regressions showed that food disgust was the most important predictor for the acceptance of edible insects, followed by previous insect consumption, food neophobia, gender, sensation seeking and food technology neophobia. The high influence of food disgust shows that not only the explicit disgust for insects is decisive for the consumer readiness of insect-based products, but also the domain specific disgust for food. Despite the strong sustainability awareness of our participants, and contrary to our expectations, sustainability consciousness did not prove to be a significant predictor for the willingness to consume insects. Implications for marketing strategies and educational interventions will be discussed.
Subfields: Insect Science, Marketing, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3430f3744a48061209d4820f8a03016b1422463
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Citations in the corpus
- A Systematic Review on Consumer Acceptance of Alternative Proteins: Pulses, Algae, Insects, Plant-based Meat Alternatives, and Cultured Meat. (2020, background): “Lammers et al. (2019) Germany 516 Online survey Insects Food neophobia, food disgust, previous insect consumption 38.”
- Factors influencing consumer perception and acceptability of insect-based foods (2021, background): “Similarly, some studies have shown that the recognised environmental and nutritional benefits did not seem to influence consumers to consider insects as food [12 ,13 ,14].”