The impact of innovation-related perception on consumer acceptance of food innovations - Development of an integrated framework of the consumer acceptance process

Innovations are an important part of the further advancement of societies in general as well as of companies in particular. Individuals can benefit from the advantages of innovations, while companies can maintain or increase their market share and profitability. However, especially in the food sector, scientific or technological innovations often encounter mistrust and rejecting reactions from consumers, resulting in decreasing acceptance of those innovations. Therefore, this paper aims to gain a deeper comprehension of consumer acceptance of innovative food products as well as to identify antecedent factors of innovation-related perception. For the empirical investigation of our conceptualized model, an online survey was conducted in Germany (n = 617) and the collected data were analyzed through structural equation modeling. The results confirmed a high predictive power of the multi-dimensional model of consumer acceptance. Our first major finding indicates that relative advantage, naturalness, novelty, and discomfort are the most important driving factors of the innovation-related perception of food products. Further important findings show that innovation-related perception has a strong positive and highly significant impact on customer perceived value, respectively a strong negative and highly significant impact on the customer perceived risk. In summary, innovation-related perception, customer perceived value, as well as customer perceived risk, are all important variables related to the acceptance of an innovative food product. The food sector can benefit from the insights provided by this study to communicate and market their products accordingly to the results to reduce mistrust and increase acceptance of food innovations on the consumer side.