Conceptual Models of Food Choice: Influential Factors Related to Foods, Individual Differences, and Society

Abstract

Understanding individual food choices is critical for transforming the current food system to ensure healthiness of people and sustainability of the planet. Throughout the years, researchers from different fields have proposed conceptual models addressing factors influencing the food choice, recognized as a key leverage to improve planetary and human health. However, a multidisciplinary approach is needed to better understand how different factors are involved and interact with each other in the decision-making process. The present paper reviews and analyzes existing models, providing an intact point-of-view by integrating key elements into a bigger framework. Key determinants of general food choice are identified and categorized, including food-internal factor (sensory and perceptual features), food-external factors (information, social environment, physical environment), personal-state factors (biological features and physiological needs, psychological components, habits and experiences), cognitive factors (knowledge and skills, attitude, liking and preference, anticipated consequences, and personal identity), as well as sociocultural factors (culture, economic variables, political elements). Moreover, possible directions of influence among the factors towards final food choice were discussed. The need of multidisciplinary impulses across research field with the support of empirical data are crucial for understanding factors influencing food choice as well as for enriching existing conceptual models. The framework proposed here would serve as a roadmap for facilitating communications and collaborations between research fields in a structural and systematic way.

Keywords: consumer behavior; context of choice; decision making; food system; healthy and sustainable food choices.

Figure 1

PRISMA flow diagram indicates the selection process of publications related to conceptual models of food choice: ¹ 61 records were excluded (1 non-English publication, 1 comment, 59 unrelated to the topic of factors influencing consumer food choice); ² 32 publications discussing factors affecting food choice without proposed conceptual models were excluded; 18 publications reported non-conceptual models (e.g., economic-psychological model, computation models, predictive models, etc.) were not included; 21 publications focusing on factors affecting other food-choice-related dependent variables (e.g., willingness to pay, nutritional label use, choice of brand, etc.) were rejected; 11 publications targeting non-healthy-adult population (preschoolers, adolescents, order adults, people with eating disorder, etc.) and 31 publications addressing food choice within specific sociocultural context (e.g., Brazilian Amazon, two urban food deserts, low-income consumers, etc.) were excluded. We excluded also 16 publications addressing food choice of specific food (e.g., traditional food, functional food, snacks, etc.) and 22 publications emphasizing the intervention for improving food choice and 10 publications examined the methodology or tools (e.g., questionnaire and interview) for measuring food choice were not included. A final set of 59 publications has been analyzed.

Figure 2

The proposed framework of factors influencing food choice developed from Eertmans et al. (2001)’s model [34]. The lines in the figure indicate the interactions between different factors.