Three Essays on Food Safety, Health, and Food Marketing PDF Download

Author: Pei Zhou
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Ensuring the safety and healthfulness of food purchases holds paramount significance for consumers, as it directly impacts not only their physical well-being but also their overall quality of life. Hence, gaining a comprehensive understanding of the factors that shape these choices becomes imperative for the promotion of public health and the prevention of diet-related diseases. This dissertation consists of three essays on food safety, health, and food marketing. It seeks to explore how consumers respond to food recalls, analyze the influence of emerging trends like online grocery shopping, product innovation, and food reformulation on the healthfulness of consumers' food purchases, and ultimately assess their impact on public health outcomes. The first essay examines the heterogeneous impact of various recall information on consumers' perceived health risks and quantifies the overall impact of food recalls on demand. Using the fresh meat market as a case study, this chapter formulates a structural random coefficient discrete choice model of consumer demand using Nielsen Retail Scanner Data from 2012 to 2016. Results show that both the number of recalls and the volume of food recalled have negative and significant effects on the demand. To minimize the negative impact of recalls, the highest priority should be given to preventing large-scale recalls, Class I recalls, product contamination recalls and recalls due to being produced without benefit of inspection or import violation. Food companies should proactively recall when problems arise. The second essay investigates the role of online grocery shopping in mediating the relationship between the food environment and the healthfulness of household food purchases, with a focus on disadvantaged groups. Using Nielsen Consumer Panel Data from 2015 to 2019, this chapter employs fixed effect models with instrument variables to address potential endogeneity associated with the local food environment and the adoption of online grocery shopping. Results suggest that online grocery services may worsen nutrition inequality linked to food environment disparities. Combining online grocery services with local in-store options can lead to improved diet quality. The third essay explores how nutrients, new ingredients, and health claims from product reformulation influence consumer decisions, dietary intake, and population health in the beverage market using a random coefficient discrete choice model and Nielsen Retail Scanner Data from 2015 to 2019. Results find that new ingredients that provide functionality have a significant positive impact on consumer choices. In addition, the use of health claims can significantly increase consumer demand for beverages. Further, the policy aimed at lowering the intake of one single nutrient may have an unintended spillover effect on other nutrient intakes, and policymakers should take a comprehensive approach and consider the broader nutrient impact of any policy aimed at reducing a specific nutrient.