How do people choose what food to buy? Answers depend on what you ask – so webuilt a research tool for African countries

By Nomzamo N. Dlamini

You’re in a shop or market and you’re buying food for the next day. How do you choose what to buy? Does it depend on how much you can spend, on what’s the healthiest, the most attractively packaged? Understanding this is an important part of food product development as well as consumer education and diet interventions for better public health.

Researchers all over the world use tools such as questionnaires to study what motivates people’s food choices. However, most of these questionnaires were developed in the global north using insights from people living in those contexts. The food choice determinants of people in emerging economies like South Africa, where a large percentage of the population live below the national poverty line, may not be fully captured by these instruments.

So, as a researcher in consumer food science working on a PhD about the factors driving food choice