Millennial consumer analysis of novel food purchasing attitudes: an application of the Means-End Chain (MEC)

The phenomenon of globalization has transformed the eating habits of consumers together with their greater awareness and attention to food safety, quality, sustainability of supply chains etc. This event process marks a starting point for a real change in consumer choices that seeks the quality of the experience. It affirms a supranational model of food in which tradition and innovation are founded; those expectations mature for an exploratory search for goods and services preferably exclusive, non- standard, recognizable. This consumption model has led agri-food companies to direct production according to the needs expressed by groups of consumers, developing products with heterogeneous and detailed attributes: not only in function of sensory and nutritional aspects but also with respect to the so-called "credence" attributes, in an attempt to address an increasingly informed, trained, aware and demanding consumer profile; For this reason, companies tend in their strategies to focus not only on the product as it is, but to favour the criteria that guide consumer choices from time to time. Studies on the increase in the consumption of organic food and the willingness of consumers to pay are numerous. As the literature confirms, novel food products respond on the one hand to the needs of modern consumers who are increasingly attentive to food with a high content of services and sustainable lifestyles, and on the other hand to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, referring to the ability that innovative production processes, the use of renewable and less impactful energy and protein sources, are more sustainable and enable, to those who choose them, greater participation in reducing the effects of food choices on the environment. In the light of the changes that the food market is going through, the research object aims to identify what is, today, the need for "food innovation" and which can be considered new foods by the Millennials. To identify this need, the logical chains, the criteria, which determine the purchasing behavior of a particular group of consumers, the Millennials, with regard to new innovative food products have been highlighted. The choice of this group comes from the great interest that the research has towards future consumers whose food demand shows evident differences with respect to the accumulated demand especially because they see in food not only a means of functional satisfaction, but a direct expression of innovative lifestyles characterized by hedonism, sociality, heterogeneity, respect for the environment, economic sustainability. The attitude analysis of this group of consumers is based on the methodology of the means-ends chains (MEC) applied to the responses to a structured questionnaire administered to a convenience sample of Millennials. The respondents, after having chosen in the questionnaire a certain category of new food from: organic products, light, gluten-free, wholemeal; laboratory products (in vitro meat); products not available in Italy but only abroad; IV and V range products; any food not consumed in Europe before 1997 (e.g. insects). As shown from the list suggested by the Milan Map, a new food product can be both a food not consumed in Europe before 1997 and a food characterized by a process or product innovation (organic food, gluten-free, IV and V range products ecc.). The surveyed people choose the attributes, consequences and values among those proposed and built logical decision chains that determine the purchase. From the data processing of the questionnaire, using the excel spreadsheet, we traced the profile of the collected sample, identified the categories of novel foods most chosen by Millennials and critically analyzed the most frequent logical-decision chains.