The alternative food industry is expected to rapidly grow due to health awareness, food safety issues related to livestock disease, environmental and energy protection, animal welfare, ethical consumption, and so on. Alternative foods are associated w...
The alternative food industry is expected to rapidly grow due to health awareness, food safety issues related to livestock disease, environmental and energy protection, animal welfare, ethical consumption, and so on. Alternative foods are associated with environmental sustainability and can reduce social costs by decreasing environmental pollution and resource energy use as well as improving health promotion. The goals of this study are to explore consumers’ purchase intentions and alternatives for the consumption extension of soy meat. To do this, a consumer survey was implemented and two econometric models, which are probit and multinomial logit, are conducted.
The empirical results show that the relevance of soy meat for meat substitutes and age are positively related to purchase intention whereas income level was the opposite to it. The major findings based on the results are as follows: First, the safety issue of soy meat may occur since it is a new food product. Thus appropriate and effective measures are devised to dispel consumers’ concerns. Second, consumers highly evaluated the competitiveness of soy meat manufactured by domestic soy. To extend the consumption of soy meat the government support for domestic soy production should be realized, which also creates the added value of a soy product. Lastly, the government should expand R&D investment for quality improvement of soy meat, especially for taste and texture.