Likelihood of buying healthy convenience food: An at-home testing procedure for ready-to-heat meals

The aim of this study is to determine drivers of consumers' likelihood of buying healthy convenience meals. Convenience meals, like hamburger, pizza and other fast food meals are often perceived as unhealthy food choices, and previous studies have stated different drivers of convenience and healthy food choices. In this study, a new concept of a complete and healthy ready-to-heat (RTH) meal was developed and tested in an at-home study in Norway. Since previous at-home testing of meals has been conducted on products like soup and lasagne, we adapted a new procedure for at-home testing of more complex meals. Based on an extensive literature review of factors previously found to influence consumers' healthy food choice, a model was developed and tested by multifactor ANOVA and multiple regression. The results indicate that the likelihood of buying healthy convenience food is first of all affected by overall liking of the meal, which is affected by liking of sensory specific product attributes like appearance, flavour, and odour. Effects of socio-demographic factors are found to be product dependent. Gender, age, education, as well as the interaction between health orientation and age, education and age, and education and overall liking influence consumers' likelihood of buying the salmon meal, while no significant socio-demographic drivers are found for the chicken meal. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.