You’re in a shop or market and you’re buying food for the next day. How do you choose what to buy? Does it depend on how much you can spend, on what’s the healthiest, the most attractively packaged? Understanding this is an important part of food product development as well as consumer education and diet interventions for better public health. Researchers all over the world use tools such as questionnaires to study what motivates people’s food choices.
However, most of these questionnaires were developed in the global north using insights from people living in those contexts. The food choice determinants of people in emerging economies like South Africa, where a large percentage of the population live below the national poverty line , may not be fully captured by these instruments. So, as a researcher in consumer food science working on a PhD about the factors driving food choice in an emerging economy, I set out, with my supervisors , to develop a questionnaire suitable for use in this context.
A more relevant research tool can provide a more accurate understanding of the factors driving people’s food choices. This could inform necessary changes in a country like South Africa, where diseases related to diet or lifestyle, like hypertension, are among the leading causes of death . The study To gather insights on the factors driving food choice in this context, we conducted focus group discussions with urban people from low, middle and high income backgrounds.
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