Concerns about unwholesome packaged food in Ghana: the case of Mampong municipality

Partial Proportional Odds Analysis of Consumers’ Packaged Food Safety Precautionary Actions in Nsuta-Mampong, Ghana

“…The results of the survey indicated that in the study area many food consumers were more concerned with unpackaged food items they buy than the packaged products, as 61.3 and 79.13 percentages of consumers indicated concern about the safety of packaged and unpackaged food items they buy respectively. These results are consistent with Abunyuwah and Awuah (2014). In terms of job profiles, only 10.7% of the respondents were health workers or had professional background in health or allied health fields.…”

“…For the negative, negative and positive signs of the coefficients for residence, sex and income respectively, implies that urban residents and males are less likely, while higher income earners are more likely, to "always/very often (VPC)" conduct precautionary checks during purchases. The results contradict the findings of Abunyuwah and Awuah (2014) for sex and residence, but agree with theirs for income in terms of direction of effects.…”

“…Similarly, respondents with higher educational attainments; who are health professionals or workers; and those who had accessed food safety awareness information or campaigns are more likely (1.328; 2.177; and 2.995 times respectively) to undertake precautionary checks always/very often (VPC) than to take "no precautionary action (NPC) or sometimes (SPC)" during purchases. While studies by (Brennan et al, 2007;Cunha et al, 2014;Jevšnik et al, 2008) in general do not support these findings, Abunyuwah and Awuah, 2014;Nagar 1996;Aktas et al, 2009;Sanlier et al, 2011, as theory posits (see Popovic et al, 2019), arrived at similar findings. Again, in table 3, respondents who are married or partnered; and those who have encountered problems with buying unwholesome food items are less likely to ignore precautionary checks during purchases.…”

“…Buyers in general, from limited and aggregated market information standpoint, see quality food in terms of a set of characteristics that differentiates individual units of a product based fundamentally on sensory parameters and relative prices. Other important attributes of quality food that draw on technological, physical, chemical, microbiological and nutritional parameters can only be handled by experts outside the market place (Abunyuwah and Awuah, 2014). Consumers at the time of purchases take these sets of attributes as given, assuming that the structure and the efficiency of the food market provide adequate control mechanisms to ensure that minimum standards required are adhered to by food producers, processors and distributors.…”

“…Research works on food safety in Ghana have concentrated on hygiene practices and safety actions among food vendors and catering services (see Ackah et al, 2011;Addo et al, 2007;Donkor et al, 2009;Feglo and Sakyi, 2012;Tomlins et al, 2002). Abunyuwah and Awuah (2014) estimated and explained the concerns about unwholesomeness of package goods people buy in binary logit framework from consumer perspective. Again, most studies which assess food safety attitudes or practices and or utilise ordinal data often resort to simple correlation, binary or multinomial regression model analysis Aktas et al, 2009;Cunha et al (2017); Dagne et al, 2019;Nayga, 1996) making interpretation general and defect of ordinal quality of the response variable (Abunyuwah, 2020).…”