The Determinants of Trust in Food Safety from the Perspective of Generation Z Students

Abstract

Theoretical background: Trust plays an important role in market relations and is a valuable bridge between the consumer and the producer. Given the importance of food, trust in its safety certainly plays a key role. There are many determinants affecting food safety trust. Due to its growing role in society, Generation Z (Gen Z) and its views on the subject should be taken into account. All the more so because this generation is skeptical, cautious, and sensitive in economic, environmental, cognitive, and social terms. Purpose of the article: The objective of the study is to identify the determinants of trust in food safety among Polish students representing Gen Z consumers. A subsidiary objective is to identify whether trust in food safety is influenced by their socio-demographic and cognitive characteristics. Research methods: A face-to-face survey method was used and 374 respondents were participating in the study. The influence of twelve determinants on trust in food safety was assessed. Cronbach’s alpha statistics were used to assess the questionnaire scale’s reliability. The KMO index (Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin) and Bartlett’s test of sphericity were applied to know the appropriateness of performing factor analysis. To simplify and reduce the number of sources of confidence in food safety identified in the study, a factor analysis was conducted using the principal components method and Varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization. To find the relationship between sociodemographic variables and the studied variables multiple regression was applied. Statistical analyses were performed using IBM SPSS Statistics 29. Main findings: The reliability of the questionnaire used in the study has been confirmed. We distinguished three groups of determinants influencing food safety trust, and these are: “Place of food production and sale”, “The way of food production and supervision”, and “External socio-economic environment”. This type of classification can be considered our original contribution to the study, as well as the fact that among the individual determinants analyzed, we identified those with the highest importance in building food safety trust. These are the country of origin, the requirements of the country’s legal and market system as well as the activities of consumer and producer organizations. It was shown that socio-demographic and cognitive characteristics play a role in perceptions of product safety and in inducing trust in food safety.

Keywords

• trust
• gen z
• students
• consumer behavior
• food safety