CONSUMER CLUSTERS AND FOOD SAFETY INFORMATION NEEDS

The work presented here was conducted as part of an EU-funded five year project investigating pathogens in the food chain, called "Control and prevention of emerging and future pathogens at cellular and molecular level throughout the food chain". Using a questionnaire, research was carried out with consumers in four countries to investigate food safety information needs and information source preferences. The work combined cluster analysis with a social marketing approach. Cluster analysis revealed that the majority of respondents can be allocated to one of eight clusters based on their information needs relating to food safety behaviour and pathogen knowledge. The respondents associated with each of the clusters can be described in terms of characteristics such as whether they have had any formal food safety education, the frequency with which they discuss food safety issues, their preferences for types of food safety messages, and a range of socio-demographic characteristics. The results provide potentially useful information for bodies designing food safety information dissemination strategies, and provide an approach for providing targeted dissemination programs that are directly connected to information needs.