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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.
This dissertation consists of three independent and mostly interrelated studies that focus on consumer behavior in the areas of food and healthcare. In my first paper, my coauthors and I analyze consumers' willingness to pay and preferences for reduced food waste and increased shelf life in relation to refrigerated ready-to-eat meals. We find evidence to suggest that consumers are willing to pay for reduced food waste, but willingness to pay for increased shelf life depends on the group being considered. The groups can be separated into health-conscious and on-the-go shoppers where only the on-the-go shopper is willing to pay a premium for a product with an increased shelf life. My second paper elicits consumers' willingness to pay for a clean label and a novel microwave technology. The results suggest that consumers are willing to pay for a clean label and the magnitude varies by group. There are also groups who are willing to pay a premium for the novel technology, but it is not homogeneous among groups. In my third paper, my coauthor and I present a theoretical model of health care consumption in emergency departments and in outpatient settings as functions of patients' time, market price of health care, and health insurance coverage. Applying our theory to data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we examine the relationship between health care utilization and health insurance coverage. From the interaction between the price effect and the network effect we find that an insured individual in a rural area has a lower likelihood of a checkup within the last year compared to an insured individual in an urban area.
In Essay One, "Demand for Perishable Foods: A Cost of Consumption Framework with Policy Implications", we challenge the convention of treating consumption and purchased quantities as identical even for food products that undergo substantial deterioration while in storage. We first prove a theorem that shows how decay processes can be incorporated into any existing demand system in a theoretically consistent way. Our method involves augmenting the prices in an existing neoclassical demand model with a function of shopping frequency and decay parameters. The augmented prices have the intuitively appealing interpretation of being 'consumption prices' which reflect the cost of consuming a unit of food. We apply this method to the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System to estimate household-level demand for foods that vary by their degree of perishability. Included composite goods include 'fresh fruit', 'fresh vegetables', 'non-fresh vegetables', 'meat', and miscellaneous food 'other'. We are able to directly estimate the quality-adjusted decay rates that rationalize observed household demands. We ask, does our framework perform better at estimating perishable food demand than 'naive' models that ignore perishability? Because our framework nests the 'naive' model, we are able to conclude that our framework performs better. We argue that our framework is well-suited for studies that inform public health policies which attempt to improve diets through improving access.Essay Two, "Measuring Consumer-Level Quality-Adjusted Food Loss: A Demand System Approach", extends the model developed in essay one by accounting for 1. the endogeneity of six variables including five shopping frequencies and total expenditure, and 2. household heterogeneity. Household heterogeneity is introduced using demographic translating to account for theoretical consistency. Necessary parameter constraints for economic regularity, namely, adding-up, zero-degree demand homogeneity in prices and income, and Slutsky symmetry, are imposed on the system of translated demand equations. Because of the highly non-linear form of the demand system, control functions (cf. instrumental variables) are used. We use our model results to infer the quality-adjusted food waste that rationalizes observed household market behavior to be around 55%.Essay three, "Store-Format Choice: A Competing Risk Approach", introduces a novel model of food retail store choice. The time since the last shopping trip is central to our competing risk framework. When a household shops, their clock starts, ticking down the time until they shop again. At each tick, they choose to shop at 'competing' store formats or may choose not to shop at all. The hazard functions of these choices, which fully characterize shopping probability distributions, are jointly estimated. This approach has many advantages over the multinomial logit models which dominate the store-format choice literature. First, we use the information of when the household does not shop. Second, by construction, shopping timing is accounted for in a way that avoids any possibility of endogeneity. Third, our non-parametrically estimated household-specific baseline hazard functions can take virtually any functional form. Indeed, we find that household hazard functions are bimodal, with households feeling increasing pressure to shop at all store formats until a peak around 7-10 days, feeling decreasing pressure until a nadir around 15-20 days, and increasing pressure thereafter. The peak at 7-10 days suggests that weekly schedules and perishable food shelf-lives strongly impel households to shop. The richness of our framework allows us to draw many other conclusions.
In recent years, "clean label" has become a trendy term in the food industry, spurring innovations in food product development. While the concept of "clean label" is relatively new, without any legal definition, it has a high market appearance and industrial relevance. Consumer demands are leading food and beverage manufacturers toward removing synthetic additives (e.g., emulsifiers) and incorporating natural ingredients. Indeed, many big food companies have committed to eliminating artificial food additives from their products altogether. However, the substitution of chemical preservatives for natural ingredients without compromising food safety, convenience, and sensory quality is a challenge for food technologists. The Age of Clean Label Foods offers a guide to this approach with a thorough exploration of "clean label" ingredients in foods and the development of these food products. All aspects of clean label foods are covered in this essential reference, including recent developments in "clean label ingredients," technologies for producing or enhancing the functionality of ingredients, the interaction of ingredients with emerging food processing technologies, legislative frameworks, and consumer attitudes. Particular emphasis is given to trendy topics in the clean label industry, such as products with reduced-fat or reduced salt content, modified starches, natural emulsifiers, antioxidants, flavorings and antimicrobials, and fermented foods, as well as active and intelligent packaging for clean label foods. Through this text, the authors hope to promote a better understanding from which food technologists and food microbiologists can operate in the "clean-label" arena, taking into consideration all the key aspects of food quality, sensory characteristics, and food safety.