Understanding food safety and consumer perception: a mixed-method approach

This study investigates the primary attributes influencing consumers’ implicit and explicit perceptions of food safety (FS). To achieve this objective, a mixed-method approach has been adopted, combining the Implicit Association Test with an online questionnaire survey based on a sample of 284 respondents. The results show that the sustainable attributes of production processes and the intangible and perceptible attributes of products are mostly associated, both implicitly and explicitly, to FS. However, significant differences emerged for some variables, especially regarding the ‘country-of-origin’, which showed only slightly association with the safety concept in the IAT but received the highest average score in the survey. Theoretically, the paper provides a comprehensive framework of the main attributes related to FS by analysing the differences between the consumers’ implicit and explicit perceptions. From a managerial perspective, it identifies the most effective strategies the different actors in the production-food chain can adopt to convey FS to the market.