Consumers' Acceptance Model for Taiwan Agriculture and Food Traceability System

Due to globalization, the food-borne illness may cause damage to people's health in various countries. Such scandals resulted in consumers losing confidence in the government's ability to manage food safety. To regain consumers' trust and confidence, many countries placed more emphasis on food traceability, which is capable of recording the details of a specific food as it makes its way from the farm to the table. Accordingly, in 2004, the Taiwan Agriculture and Food Traceability System (TAFTS) were implemented to govern food safety. Being the key stakeholder along the food supply chain, consumers' acceptance to food traceability plays a critical role in the promotion and persistence of the policy. Based on the technology acceptance model (TAM), a consumers' acceptance model is proposed by adding three extra constructs of mobile anxiety (MA), social influence (SI), and perceived limitations (PL). A survey of 380 participants being recruited from two major metropolises in Taiwan is conducted to examine the proposed model via structural equation modeling analysis. The empirical results show that the proposed model possesses good model fits and explanatory power. Some findings identify that perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) exhibit significantly positive effects while PLhas a significantly negative effect on both attitude (ATT) and intention to use (ITU). Besides, ATT partially mediates the relationship between beliefs (PU, PEOU or PL) and ITU. However, due to high Internet usage rate and the popularity of social networks, there is no significant effect between two constructs of MA and ATT, MA and ITU, SI and ATT, or SI and ITU. Finally, some recommendations are provided to policymakers for better implementation of TAFTS.