Healthy Food Recognition: the In-Store Decision-Making Process of Young Shoppers

This paper presents the results of empirical research designed to examine the instore decision-making process taken by young shoppers when selecting healthy cereal flakes. The research was carried out in January 2018 on a sample of 66 students (17-18 years old) at 3 high schools located in the Wielkopolska region. Data collection was performed through an experiment and the PAPI technique. The experiment was carried out in the ShopLab at the Poznań University of Economics and Business – a research laboratory organized as a mock-up of a convenience store and dedicated to empirical studies of in-store purchasing behaviours. The main findings show that young shoppers consider nutrients (in particular sugar content), packaging, brand and type as the most important characteristics of cereals as a product, with nutritional information being the main decision-making criteria used for selecting healthy cereals. Empirical studies conducted with the use of an eye-tracker confirmed compliance between declarations and actual behaviour only in case of nutrients. In other cases there were significant differences, as much as 50%, between the former and the latter.