Food Neophobia in Consumers

Innovation in the food industry has assumed high importance as a tool to improve competitiveness and increase firms’ market shares. Over last years several new products have been developed where fats, vitamins, and some other ingredients have been added or removed, and new processing technologies have been implemented to increase sensory quality, products properties and/or food shelf-life and preservation standards. Besides technologies such as thermal methods, irradiation, but also microwave, high pressure processing (HPP) and pulsed electric field (PEF), new frontiers of bioengineering and nanotechnologies are providing more and more applications in the food sector. In particular, nanotechnologies are moving up the frontier of food processing and are opening the way to new food chain functions, thanks to nanostructured additives and ingredients, nanostructured delivering systems that improve the availability of bioactive compounds, nanosensors and nanomaterials for intelligent packaging (Sozer and Kokini, 2009; Sodano, Gorgitano, Verneau and Vitale, 2016). Notwithstanding the benefits of new technologies in terms of food safety, healthiness or quality are recognized by scientific community, consumers are rather wary of new food and new food technologies and that is confirmed by the high rate of new products market failures (Ram and Sheth, 1989; Chen, Anders and An, 2013). In some cases caution or tendency to avoid food with high level of technology can end up to a real food technophobia. Even if food technophobia is often related to the larger concept of food neophobia, that is the reluctance to eat unfamiliar foods (Dovey, Staples, Gibson and Halford, 2008), it more specifically refers to the way product has been produced (Grunert, Bredahl and Scholderer, 2003). Then, factors influencing it are rather distinct and so are methods and tools that have been developed to evaluate it. Following, after a definition and a brief description of food technophobia, an overview is given of factors that can affect the attitude toward food technologies and of psychometric scales that can be used to measure it.