Consumer Perceptions of Fruit and Vegetable Quality

Consumer Perceptions of Fruit and Vegetable Quality
Author: Keraita, B.
Publisher: International Water Management Institute (IWMI)
Total Pages: 35
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 929090822X

With increasing change of traditional diets, and the emergence of new supply and marketing chains, urban food consumers in low-income countries are faced with multiple food safety challenges, among which microbial contamination and pesticides are key concerns for fruits and vegetables sold on urban markets in West Africa. Although consumers have a genuine interest in healthy food, and are willing to pay premiums, their interpretation of food quality and risks deviates from scientific health risk assessments and does not translate into recommended risk mitigation behavior. To safeguard public health, alternative measures are needed to support consumers’ risk awareness and decision making. The review looked at common and less-common options to trigger and support behavioral change, including safety labeling (certification), corporate social responsibility models, incentive systems and social marketing of safe practices, to address potential food safety risks from farming in urban and peri-urban areas. Overall, it appears that regulatory measures for risk management, including certifications, will be – for now – less effective in the West African setup due to low educational levels in view of chemical and microbial risk, diverse and often informal food chains, poor safety supporting infrastructure and weak institutional capacities for compliance monitoring.

Local Food Systems; Concepts, Impacts, and Issues

Local Food Systems; Concepts, Impacts, and Issues
Author: Steve Martinez
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
Total Pages: 87
Release: 2010-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1437933629

This comprehensive overview of local food systems explores alternative definitions of local food, estimates market size and reach, describes the characteristics of local consumers and producers, and examines early indications of the economic and health impacts of local food systems. Defining ¿local¿ based on marketing arrangements, such as farmers selling directly to consumers at regional farmers¿ markets or to schools, is well recognized. Statistics suggest that local food markets account for a small, but growing, share of U.S. agricultural production. For smaller farms, direct marketing to consumers accounts for a higher percentage of their sales than for larger farms. Charts and tables.

Fruit and Vegetable Quality

Fruit and Vegetable Quality
Author: Robert L. Shewfelt
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2000-04-18
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9781566767859

Improved quality requires integration across business functions and scientific disciplines. Based on this premise, Fruit and Vegetable Quality: An Integrated View presents 15 unique perspectives on achieving greater quality and guidance for a more integrated approach to postharvest handling and fruit and vegetable research. Designed for anyone involved in the management, production, handling, distribution, or processing of fruits and vegetables, it provides concise descriptions of important issues, roadmaps to the literature in specific fields, assessments of current knowledge and research needs, and specific examples of product-based research. Your guide to the dynamic developments in integrating fruit and vegetable quality projects, Fruit and Vegetable Quality: An Integrated View also presents a range of options for achieving better coordination of research across scientific disciplines.

Integrated View of Fruit and Vegetable Quality

Integrated View of Fruit and Vegetable Quality
Author: Wojciech J Florkowski
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2018-01-18
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1351082213

This book focuses on quality of produce by addressing its various aspects. By applying a disciplinary perspective, we work toward an integrated view, placing papers in the broader context of the processes that are responsible for the supply of fresh produce. While a number of technical papers focus on factors affecting quality, policy issues are also discussed. Several papers link the market performance with the ability of the existing institutional structures to provide incentives to supply the optimal quality produce. The topics covered in this contributed volume address quality issues ranging from cultural practices to postharvest handling, retailing, and home consumption. Perspectives of horticulturists, agronomists, food scientists, engineers, and economists should be looked upon as a system applied to solve practical problems faced by scientists, the produce industry, and policy makers. The immediate benefit of this book is improved understanding of specific quality issues and marketing problems, while suggesting the need for a multidisciplinary approach for optimal solutions. This book is of interest to horticulturists, agronomists, food scientists, engineers, and economists, as well as the produce industry, and policy makers in food quality and safety.

Food, People and Society

Food, People and Society
Author: Lynn J. Frewer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2013-03-09
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3662046016

A unique insight into the decision-making and food consumption of the European consumer. The volume is essential reading for those involved in product development, market research and consumer science in food and agro industries and academic research. It brings together experts from different disciplines in order to address the fundamental issues related to predicting food choice, consumer behavior and societal trust in quality and safety regulatory systems. The importance of the social and psychological context and the cross-cultural differences and how they influence food choice are also covered in great detail.

Tomatoland

Tomatoland
Author: Barry Estabrook
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2012-04-24
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1449408419

2012 IACP Award Winner in the Food Matters category Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point? Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation's top restaurants. Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a who's who cast of characters in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-Marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents' medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years. Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well as an expose of today's agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

Measurement of Food Preferences

Measurement of Food Preferences
Author: Halliday MacFie
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1461521718

This book provides comprehensive coverage of the numerous methods used to characterise food preference. It brings together, for the first time, the broad range of methodologies that are brought to bear on food choice and preference. Preference is not measured in a sensory laboratory using a trained panel - it is measured using consumers by means of product tests in laboratories, central locations, in canteens and at home, by questionnaires and in focus groups. Similarly, food preference is not a direct function of sensory preference - it is determined by a wide range of factors and influences, some competing against each other, some reinforcing each other. We have aimed to provide a detailed introduction to the measurement of all these aspects, including institutional product development, context effects, variation in language used by consumers, collection and analysis of qualitative data by focus groups, product optimisation, relating prefer ence to sensory perception, accounting for differences in taste sensitivity between consumers, measuring how attitudes and beliefs determine food choice, measuring how food affects mood and mental performance, and how different expectations affect sensory perception. The emphasis has been to provide practical descriptions of current methods. Three of the ten first-named authors are university academics, the rest are in industry or research institutes. Much of the methodology is quite new, particularly the repertory grid coupled with Generalised Procrustes Analysis, Individualised Difference Testing, Food and Mood Testing, and the Sensory Expectation Models.

Values, Lifestyles, and Psychographics

Values, Lifestyles, and Psychographics
Author: Lynn R. Kahle
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2014-03-05
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317780833

This book showcases papers presented at the annual Advertising and Consumer Psychology Conference. The contributors -- active scholars with both practitioner and academic backgrounds -- share an interest in the general area of psychographics, values, and lifestyle in advertising. The interdisciplinary and international mix of authors bring a diverse perspective to this volume, which is divided into four nonorthogonal sections. The first section deals with theoretical and conceptual issues in advertising research, while the second section presents chapters devoted to improving methodology. The final two sections illustrate how value, lifestyle, and psychographic research have been used to understand differences among people. The first of these final two sections emphasizes differences among people at different times (commonly called trend research), and the second emphasizes differences among people across national boundaries. Collectively, these chapters illustrate how practical state-of-the-art research in values, lifestyles, and psychographics can be. Thoughtful consideration of values, lifestyles, and psychographics as they are manifested in quality research can improve advertising and marketing practice, and can help the business community deliver products and services that are more in line with consumers' needs.

Advances in Fresh-Cut Fruits and Vegetables Processing

Advances in Fresh-Cut Fruits and Vegetables Processing
Author: Olga Martin-Belloso
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2010-10-21
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1420071238

Despite a worldwide increase in demand for fresh-cut fruit and vegetables, in many countries these products are prepared in uncontrolled conditions and have the potential to pose substantial risk for consumers. Correspondingly, researchers have ramped up efforts to provide adequate technologies and practices to assure product safety while keeping n