Which are the sustainable attributes affecting the real consumption behaviour? Consumer understanding and choices.

AbstractPurpose – This is an exploratory study on consumer information and behaviour towards green, health, local,social and environmental credentials on labels. It focusses on many dimensions of sustainability in the foodproducts that affect consumer choices with a dual purpose: to identify and define “sustainable consumption”behaviour in broad sense and to investigate empirically the factors affecting the real consumption behaviours.The purpose of this paper is to shed light on consumers’ understanding, motivation and use of sustainablelabelling in order to understand the role sustainability information plays in the food products market.Design/methodology/approach – Two focus groups in order to investigate consumer motivation andbehaviour in-depth and to prepare the questionnaire. Identification of the outcomes that could summarizesustainable consumption combining: purchase of local products, consume only seasonal fruit, prefer productswith recyclable packaging, attention to the fat content in foods, give importance to traceability and purchaseproducts only in the place of origin. Identification of the “at risk” virtuous consumer, using a binary logisticregression approach, taking into account demographic characteristics, the food and nutrition value system,experience, knowledge, institutional factors and marketing.Findings – Results from the focus groups are mainly in line with the empirical analysis, highlighting the keyrole of education in influencing consumer attitude and behaviour. Consumers give little attention toinformation provided on the label for sustainable food consumption and environmental protection and havelittle knowledge of environmental problems. The virtuous consumer appears to give importance to a betterfood nutrition value system, to pay more attention to ingredients and instructions on the label, to be moreattentive to environmental and sustainable attributes, to be concerned about product quality and to beslightly influenced by brands and special offers.Research limitations/implications – The findings from the empirical analysis confirm the results fromfocus groups even if it was not possible from the empirical analysis to investigate in-depth the marketingaspects concerning the food choice. This limit probably comes from the low number of observations.Further research will focus on these marketing aspects.Practical implications – Products with sustainable attributes can become a strategic variable and allowcompanies to gain a competitive advantage, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises. This mayencourage the development of new marketing channels based on the direct relationship between producer andthe new consumer demand, increasingly sensitive to the food security issues.Social implications – There is a potential interest and sensitiveness to having sustainable behaviour in abroad sense, but there is a lack of knowledge about how to behave to be sustainable. In the absence of bindingrules, it is necessary that government promote information and campaigns to generate greater awareness onsustainability, aiming at increasing knowledge to drive the consumer’s choices. This may lead to virtuous resultsin terms of reducing social costs related to an unhealthy diet, food waste and unsustainable consumption.Originality/value – The results show that despite the appearance of attention to the environment and tohealthy food which is associated with this emerging critical consumer in the literature, there remains theproblem of the consumer giving little attention to information provided on the label for sustainable food consumption and environmental protection. This is the problem of “rules of thumb” in purchasing decisionsthat prevail in the following situations: when consumers have an overload of information that exceeds theirprocessing limits; when they tend to base their decision making on heuristics, focussing their choices onbrands as a proxy for high-quality, product-related characteristics.