IMPACT OF SUSTAINABLE FOOD LABELS AND PACKAGING ON CONSUMER PURCHASE INTENTION. A STUDY ON MILLENIALS.

Abstract

This paper aims to highlight important factors relating to sustainable food attributes like their packaging and labels and its impact on consumer attitude and on purchase intention. Young consumers represent a powerful segment of consumers in the development of eco-friendly conscious population, and also a promising market for green products. Therefore, more firms are targeting this section of population. There is a need to develop environmental education marketing programs and strategic marketing campaigns in order to increase the awareness on eco -friendly products of young consumer segment. (Ahmed et al, 2020)

The evolution of human behaviour as led to its concern for environment. Therefore, more and more consumers especially the young people are moving towards consuming sustainable foods. But in almost all previous researches focused on consumer attitude towards buying green food products have highlighted that quality, trust and safety of sustainable foods is still a major barrier. Lack of awareness of ecolabels, inability to differentiate between green and non-green foods and issues relating to their authenticity has led to low demand of these products and high prices has resulted in dissatisfaction among people, (Paul and Rana, 2017). The high prices of green products as manufacturing cost is relatively high of producing sustainable products has resulted in low demand for green products and is a prime reason as why green foods are still a niche market in India. Increase in demand for green products especially the food items is not only needed to maintain good health but is also the needed to save the environment from further degradation particularly the soil and water.

Therefore, this research is focused on qualitative, in-depth analysis of issues relating to typology of sustainable food labels in India and the kind of impact it has on the attitudes of millennials. Also, what are the features of packaging of sustainable food products that communicate product attributes better other than them being just organic and lastly, to assess consumer awareness regarding different kinds of ecolabels and their understanding of how ecolabels are different from other types of labels.

The methodology adopted for this research would be qualitative and data will be collected from the participants through closed ended questionnaires.

This study aims to bring more clarity to what are the problems that young consumers face in reading and interpreting the green food labels and will also try to understand their trust and quality issues associated with consuming green foods on a daily basis.