Assessing Consumers’ Preference and Loyalty towards Biopolymer Films for Food Active Packaging

Abstract

Contemporary society faces numerous food-related challenges: on the one hand, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure that people have access to fresh, nutritious, and safe food products around the world, while on the other hand, consumers from ‘low income’ countries are starving, while food products are sometimes discarded because it is difficult to prolong shelf-life. To overcome such challenges, edible active films, called biopolymer films, were developed as materials to cover or wrap food products to extend their shelf-life, as they can offer additional protection. Therefore, this article aims to study consumers’ preference and loyalty towards the innovative, active, green, and sustainable characteristics of biopolymer films for the active packaging of food products. A quantitative empirical investigation was carried out among consumers in an emerging market, pinpointing their behavior toward such a novel food packaging material. The conceptual model designed was assessed using structural equation modelling. The results show that consumers tend to accept and prefer biopolymer-film packaging, as it maintains the characteristics of the product and thus extends its shelf-life. The results also revealed consumers’ openness to eco-sustainable consumption and willingness to pay more for the benefits of this packaging.

The Effect of Overpackaging Solutions in E-Commerce Towards Consumer Preference

“…The T-Statistics value of the hypothesis is 2.189, which is greater than 1.96, and the significance level is 0.029, lower than 0.05. This finding is aligned with a previous study by Socaciu et al (2022), which supports that consumers prefer green packaging materials. Respondents believe utilizing eco-friendly packaging can reduce the negative impact of overpackaging, such as reducing packaging waste and making the recycling process easier for consumers.…”

“…Based on that, the author determined seven variables: government policy, the establishment of a recycling system, innovative green packaging materials, packaging optimization strategy, integrated packaging for large-scale orders, increasing awareness towards the preservation of the environment, and consumer preference. With those variables, the author developed a framework that includes several variables that were primarily derived from previous studies that focus on similar objectives, such as from Xie et al (2021), Lu et al (2020), Kao et al (2020), and Socaciu et al (2022. The following hypothesis is used to build the research framework, which would be the basis for gathering data for this research.…”

Assessing the Role of Digital Awareness in Promoting Polymer‐Based Sustainability

“…They observed that implicit and explicit environmental friendliness indicate a positive effect on perceived salience and greenness. [13,14] Based on the analysis of the literature, the authors tried to investigate the following research question (RQ):…”

The coexistence of carboxymethylcellulose and transglutaminase modified the physicochemical properties and structure of whey protein concentrate films

“…Therefore, edible films or coatings based on biopolymers, including polysaccharides, proteins and lipids, were considered a promising alternative for films or coatings made from synthetic polymers due to their biodegradability benefits (Agarwal, 2021). However, single biopolymer films have drawbacks that limit their commercial production, such as poor barrier and mechanical properties and high opacity (Vodnar, 2022).…”