Naturalness is an important heuristic method for examining consumers’ evaluation and choice of food. A new study has examined this concept and compared the various naturalness scales in existence to further understand how consumers feel about their food choices.
Humans have an innate sense of attachment to natural things (Wilson, 1984). Therefore, it should not be surprising that most people, in recent decades, have a strong preference for natural foods (Rozin, Fischler, & Shields-Argelès, 2012). The results of the Nielsen Global Health and Wellness Survey (2015), conducted in 60 countries and involving 30,000 consumers, reveal that the most desirable food attributes are freshness, naturalness, and minimal processing. Similarly, insights from the Kampffmeyer Food Innovation Study (2012: 1) involving over 4,000 consumers in eight European countries show food naturalness as a “decisive buying incentive,” and almost three-quarters of the respondents perceive a close connection between “natural” and “healthy.” Overall, these market research findings show that a lot of consumers in developed countries want to eat natural foods. From a natural science perspective, naturalness certainly does not mean that a food is less risky, healthier, or tastier. This is not how most consumers perceive naturalness, however (Rozin, 2005, Rozin, 2006). They perceive naturalness as a positive food product attribute. However, the relative importance of food naturalness varies across cultures, countries and history (Rozin et al., 2004). Humans have traditionally tried to control and minimize natural risks, and the introduction of commercially processed foods in the 1950s in developed countries contributed to longer shelf life of food, food security and nutrition security (Weaver et al., 2014). Consumers at that time showed a strong preference for processed foods.
Study researcher, Michael Siegrist, professor for consumer behaviour at ETH Zurich and author of a previous naturalness study in Trends in Food Science & Technology notes that:
“...The importance of naturalness for foodstuffs is of great practical relevance, yet it ha(d) never been the subject of in-depth research..."
In recent years, several scales have been proposed to measure the importance of naturalness for consumers. These scales vary in the number of items they contain and in the aspects they cover. Previous research by the same researchers had found that for the majority of consumers, food naturalness is crucial. This finding could be observed across various countries and in the different years when the studies were conducted. Therefore, neglecting the aspect of naturalness in the food industry may be very costly in the end. A systematic review of the concept of naturalness also revealed differences across studies in how naturalness has been defined and measured. Based on a content analysis of the measurement scales, the items used to measure the importance of naturalness can be classified into three categories:
1) the way the food has been grown (food origin)
2) how the food has been produced (what technology and ingredients have been used), and
3) the properties of the final product.
The aim of this latest research was to examine how strongly the different scales are correlated, whether they differ in their predictive validity, and which scale should be recommended for the assessment of the importance of naturalness for consumers in future studies. Since existing scales incorporated items that are also used for the validation of the scale and many scales only consider a restricted number of different aspect on naturalness, the researchers constructed a new naturalness scale that covers the production process and the ingredients. To compare the scales, they conducted an online survey (n = 632) with participants from Germany. The results showed that the various scales are highly intercorrelated. All scales were good predictors of the purchase frequency of organic foods, perceived willingness to eat in-vitro meat and perceived naturalness of in-vitro meat but the researchers found that the new scale was in fact not particularly better than the others. They concluded that the scales can be used interchangeably and recommended using the shortest, and therefore, most efficient measure for the importance of naturalness.
Importantly, the results illuminate that new scales have been introduced without demonstrating that they measure something different. Further research is therefore needed into the development of such a measure. This would enable future studies to examine which of the food naturalness attributes are more relevant for consumers, which would be extremely important for the industry in order to develop their products.
Michel, F., & Siegrist, M. (2019). How should importance of naturalness be measured? A comparison of different scales. Appetite, 140, 298-304.
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