Consumer trust, risk and food safety: A review

Abstract

Consumers’ attitudes to trust and risk are key issues in food safety research and attention needs to be focused on clearly defining a framework for analysing consumer behaviour in these terms. In order to achieve this, a detailed review of the recent literature surrounding risk, trust and the relationship between the two must be conducted. This paper aims to collate the current social sciences literature in the fields of food safety, trust and risk. It provides an insight into the economic and other modelling procedures available to measure consumers’ attitudes to risk and trust in food safety and specifically notes the need for future research to concentrate on examining risk and trust as inter-related variables rather than two distinct, mutually exclusive concepts. A framework is proposed which it is hoped will assist in devising more effective research to support risk communication to consumers.

Keywords:

• Trust
• risk
• food safety
• consumer behaviour
• literature review

Acknowledgments

Supported by the European Commission, Quality of Life Programme, Key Action 1 – Food, Nutrition, and Health, Research Project “Food Risk Communication and Consumers’ Trust in the Food Supply Chain – TRUST” (contract no. QLK1-CT-2002-02343).

Notes

The web search took place on 6 December 2004 searching the maximum number of years allowable for each database. All references are available at request of the author