Knowing what motivates people to select the food they purchase and consume is not only necessary for optimal product development, but is crucial for achieving successful diet intervention and effective consumer education towards positive public health outcomes. Food choice motives are vast and complex, and understanding them is a subject that researchers have approached, determined and quantified in a number of ways, given their important implications.

PhD candidate Nomzamo Dlamini of the University of Pretoria’s Department of Consumer and Food Sciences recently published her article “I find it hard to change poor food habits”: Measuring food choice motives in an emerging economy which sought to develop a tool to study people’s food choices in an emerging economy. While researchers all over the world, including in Africa, use questionnaires to study people’s food choice motives, Dlamini realised that most of these tools were developed in the global north, using insights from people living in these contexts.

“As these questionnaires did not fully reflect the factors considered by people in an emerging economy when making food choices, I saw a need to create our own tool using present-day insights from people in this context,” she says. “In that way, we could get a more accurate understanding of the factors driving people’s food choices, and use this information to implement necessary changes.”

Dlamini combined both quantitative and qualitative research to produce an alternative food choice questionnaire for use in emerging economies. A total of 814 completed responses from people living in urban cities in all nine provinces of South Africa was obtained. The majority of respondents were women (69%) and black (58%). They also tended to be working class (30%), full-time employed (37%), between 18 and 35 years old (42%) and with high school education (45%) completed. 58% were the primary decision makers regarding food eaten and purchased in the household. This tool, she says, is more nuanced, and can be leveraged by researchers in emerging economies to understand the factors driving food choice.

The statements derived from the study, highlighting factors underlying food choice in an emerging economy include: Healthy eating constraints, Frugality, Emotional eating, Meat appeal, Weather, Quality seeking, and Cooking constraints. Some interesting findings were the unique factors that emerged in this questionnaire that are not typically reflected in conventional food choice questionnaires. “This includes, for example, the constraints to healthy eating, rather than the health-positive questions found in conventional questionnaires. Affordability (in addition to preferences for unhealthy food, mood, and longstanding unhealthy food habits) makes a healthy diet hard to attain for many. Another example is the importance of meat eating, which was uniquely highlighted in our questionnaire. For many Africans, eating meat is aspirational and an important part of culture and socialisation, with everyday meals and special occasions planned and built around meat. In contrast, people in developed countries are in the process of adjusting to eating less meat, and meat may lose its significance in these countries,” Dlamini says.

A follow-up study to this questionnaire was the application of the food choice questionnaire to test its ability to predict people’s food choices, and Dlamini says that the results look promising. “We also did a cross-cultural study as part of the InnoFood Africa project by administering the questionnaire to urban dwellers in seven different countries (South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, France. Finland and Norway) and the analysis of this data is soon to be underway. Something else I am currently busy with is wrapping up my time in the USA as a visiting student researcher on a Fulbright scholarship. My time here has been inspiring and invaluable for my growth as a researcher,” she says.

“I would like to extend my gratitude to my supervisors, Professor Riette de Kock and Professor Hely Tuorila, our statistician Gopika Ramkilawon, and members of the InnoFood Africa project for their input in this work,” Dlamini says. “This was an interdisciplinary project which required support from various fields; our material needed to be translated in preparation for the focus group discussions, and I needed guidance from social scientists on how to handle the resulting transcripts. A lot of this study involved learning on the job from me – from coding transcripts using unfamiliar software, to dealing with a series of really large datasets from hundreds of respondents, and I was grateful to everyone who so willingly assisted,” she says.

Dlamini hopes that researchers in emerging economies (and beyond) will apply the questionnaire to understand food choice motives in various populations and locations. The insights obtained from such studies can inform policy amendments, diet intervention strategies and consumer education initiatives towards positive public health and sustainability outcomes.