1. Introduction
In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the outbreak of the highly transmittable Coronavirus (COVID-19) as a pandemic [
1], which is considered to be the third pandemic in the 21st century [
2]. After one year’s development, there have been more than 138 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally and more than 751 million vaccine doses administered in April 2021 [
1]. Although the situation is expected to improve in the next several years, the COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly has widespread effects on society and consumers, hinting towards the dynamic changes in the market [
3,
4]. Some studies have found that there has been increased consumption of unhealthy food during the initial ‘lockdown’ period [
5,
6]. However, many studies have recently reported that consumers are increasingly concerned about the health and safety aspects of their food consumption and want to protect and strengthen their immune systems through their food diets [
7,
8,
9,
10]. In a 2021 survey from Accenture, an investigation involving more than 3000 consumers in 15 countries has shown that the pandemic is likely to create a more sustainable and healthier consumption era over the following 10 years [
11]. This development can permanently alter consumer behaviours and cause lasting structural changes to products and industries [
11]. Therefore, enterprises and marketers in the organic and green food sectors need to accelerate their business objectives and capabilities to match the shifting consumption patterns for their products and services during the current pandemic and post-pandemic periods.
Beginning in the 1990s, green food has been one of the most successful eco-labelling innovations in the Chinese food production industry [
12]. Green food primarily refers to a full range of safe and premium edible agricultural products and related processed products, and are required to be grown in an ecologically sound environment, produced based on green food production standards, adopt the wholesome quality control, and granted the right to have a ‘green food’ certification [
13]. There are two different standards for green food: Grade A and Grade AA. Grade A allows food producers to use limited chemical pesticides, chemical fertilisers, and other chemical inputs. Grade AA has stricter standards that exclude the guidelines mentioned above and are equivalent to Chinese organic food production standards [
13]. After 30 years of development, Chinese green food production and consumption have experienced rapid growth and continued to expand in scale. According to official statistics in 2020, there have been 19,321 green food enterprises, 43,729 green-food-labelled products, and USD 66.52 billion of domestic sales, with a growing average of 9.2% annually [
14]. Meanwhile, many Chinese families pay increasing attention to their health, quality lifestyles, environmental protection, and food security, and prefer to consume safe and green food products [
15,
16]. Despite undergoing exponential development and resulting in a booming trend, green food sales account for an extremely low percentage of the total food sales in China (i.e., less than 1%). Thus, there is an excellent prospect for the further expansion of green food consumption in China.
Since the Chinese green food industry faces an upward demand for sustainable consumption and growth potential, stakeholders in the green food sector need to understand the effective mechanisms of consumers’ green food purchase intentional behaviours during the current and post-pandemic periods in more detail. The theory of planned behaviour (TPB), proposed by Ajzen [
17], is one of the most widely used theories predicting consumers’ purchase intentions of environmentally friendly food products [
18,
19]. According to Ajzen [
17], the TPB is open for modification by incorporating new constructs or altering the path. Moreover, some nonnegligible limitations of applying TPB exist, and therefore, various refinements and extensions of TPB theory have been suggested to improve its effectiveness and applicability [
20,
21]. It is necessary to use multidisciplinary approaches for better understanding consumers’ food preferences and acceptances in different contexts and eating scenarios [
22]. Consequently, certain important factors related to consumer behaviours during a pandemic should be investigated and validated to establish an updated green food purchase intention model.
Researchers and theorists have recurrently criticised the TPB for its insufficient consideration of other human behavioural constructs such as moral and ethical concerns [
20]. Moral attitude is considered another salient behavioural factor in purchasing environmentally friendly food products since these behaviours are commonly perceived as pro-environmental actions [
23]. Moreover, recent studies that investigated the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on food consumption show that many consumers have been increasingly concerned about the health aspects [
7,
8,
9]. Health concerns are considered as one of the significant drivers promoting consumers’ attitudes and intentions towards purchasing environmentally friendly food products [
24]. Lastly, the emergence of the pandemic has strongly affected the global food systems, such as a collapse in a growing demand for global agri-food products, the severe disruptions of domestic and international food supply chains, the shortage of labour for food production enterprises, and the shifting consumption pattern [
8,
25,
26]. Currently, no studies have established a green food purchase intention model with an integration of COVID-19 pandemic influences and incorporating salient factors among Chinese consumers. Therefore, it is necessary to adjust former models by integrating important and new factors that account for green food consumption and COVID-19 to understand consumers’ green food consumption better during a pandemic.
Hence, this paper aims to explore an appropriate model to explain and predict Chinese consumers’ green food purchase intentions during the current and post-pandemic periods. Based on the TPB, we have proposed an extended theory of planned behaviour (E-TPB) model and applied a structural equation modelling (SEM) approach to conduct model comparisons and examine the performance of each construct. Therefore, the outcome of this research can contribute to offering significant practical implications for researchers and marketers in the Chinese green food industry. The present study can generate new insight into the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis on green food consumption. Moreover, marketers can use our findings to develop innovative marketing strategies to promote green food consumption in China further.
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows:
Section 2 outlines the conceptual model developed for the present study and includes hypotheses to be examined;
Section 3 explains the research methodology, which includes data collection, measurement, and data analysis;
Section 4 displays descriptive statistics and SEM;
Section 5 discusses of results and implications;
Section 6 provides conclusions and includes research limitations and suggestions for future work.
5. Discussion
The present study explores Chinese consumers’ green food purchase intentions by developing and applying an extended model adapted to COVID-19 pandemic influences. A new E-TPB model was proposed by extending the original TPB model, incorporating three salient variables (i.e., moral norm, health consciousness, and IOC) into the framework. The results of our empirical investigation revealed better applicability in the E-TPB model than the TPB model and identified several key factors relating to Chinese consumers’ green food purchase intentions.
Regarding the original TPB constructs’ impact on green food intentional purchases, attitude and PBC were found to have a significant positive effect on Chinese consumers’ green food intentional behaviour. Consumers’ attitudes play a significant role in driving consumers’ intentions towards purchasing green food. When consumers have a positive attitude towards green food products, their intentions to buy green food increase. This result is consistent with former studies [
19,
27,
28,
29] involving environmentally friendly food products. Thus, green food enterprises need to make an effort to increase consumers’ positive perceptions and attitudes of green food products, such as highlighting the benefits of branded food and conducting promotional campaigns to increase consumers’ beliefs and knowledge. PBC is also an important aspect that is directly associated with consumers’ green food purchase intentions, which conforms with conclusions of previous studies [
19,
34,
59]. Specifically, the present study applies a quantitative approach to validate the results of recent qualitative research [
7] that the PBC is the influential antecedent of an intentional purchase of green food products during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, marketers in the Chinese green food sector should increase varieties and expand the supply channels of green food products. Online shopping is a trend for current food consumption in China, especially during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Marketers in the green food industry can cooperate with a takeout platform (e.g., Eleme app) and retail podium (e.g., Freshhema app) to increase availability and convenience. Interestingly, the correlation of the association between consumers’ subjective norms and their green food buying intentions differed within the TPB and E-TPB models, which was significant in TPB but was negative and not significant in the E-TPB. A possible explanation of this incongruence is due to the unstable, poor predictive power of subjective norms, and variation in different contexts [
60,
61], especially regarding organic and green food purchases [
32,
39]. Qi and Ploeger [
19] have substituted the subjective norm into the factors of face consciousness and group conformity when investigating Chinese consumers’ behaviour. The results from their study [
19] showed that the replacement greatly improved the predictive power of explaining consumers’ intentional behaviour of green food products in the Chinese context.
In the extended model, the analysed results supported findings from studies involving the purchase of environmentally friendly food products [
27,
39] and demonstrated that consumers’ moral attitude towards green food is a significant positive driver of intentional purchases. In particular, moral attitude showed a significant effect since it resulted in a larger contribution to the explanatory power of the proposed E-TPB framework. Our findings suggest that more Chinese consumers feel it is a moral norm to buy green food products as their purchase intentions increase. Therefore, marketers can highlight concepts related to moral imperatives in their marketing strategies to influence consumers to gain positive feelings in purchasing green food. As expected, health consciousness emerges as one significant driver of green food purchase intention as well, which correlates with previous findings that the consumers’ health concern is one of the primary determinants influencing their environmentally friendly food behavioural intentions [
62,
63,
64]. Thus, marketers in the Chinese green food industry should disseminate its health-related benefits and make it a primary objective while communicating with consumers. In regard to the IOC, our results indicated that there is a significant impact on consumers’ health consciousness and their purchase intentions during the pandemic. Our findings show that the pandemic has shifted an individual’s consumption pattern and structure, which is consistent with recent studies [
4,
49,
50]. The pandemic has greatly increased an individual’s safety and health concerns, and people are increasingly focused on health benefits, which also supports findings from Meixner and Katt [
3]. Thus, facing the rise in willingness and existing challenges, companies in the green food industry should quickly adjust their production, inspection, supply, and marketing strategies to better respond to the pandemic. For example, companies can provide information about virus and safety inspections with their product packages, increase online sales channels, prevent the upswing in prices, and strengthen promotional activities, especially in highlighting the benefits of green food products.
Finally, in terms of comparing the overall performance between the standard and extended frameworks, our results have validated the effectiveness of TPB and demonstrated the superior performance of E-TPB in regard to explaining and predicting Chinese consumers’ green food purchase intentions. Notably, the explanatory power difference between the original TPB model (R2 = 49%) and the E-TPB model (R2 = 68%) in predicting consumers’ intentions to buy green food products was higher than 19%. Hence, the E-TPB model is more appropriate for explaining and predicting Chinese consumers’ green food purchase intentions in the current and post-pandemic periods.