1. Introduction
With the exploitation and destruction of the environment and natural resources, the concept of “green consumerism” has prospered and attracted increasing attention in the world [
1,
2]. Food consumption has been seen as a major issue of achieving sustainability, because it is associated with the environment, individual and public health, social cohesion, and the economy [
3]. As the world’s largest food consumer group, Chinese consumers have profoundly changed their consumption patterns and increasingly started preferring environmentally friendly food products after a series of environmental problems (e.g., poor air quality, heavy smog) and frequent food safety scandals (e.g., the gutter oil scandal, abuse of sodium cyclamate) [
4,
5]. Facing this tendency, the Chinese government has adopted the green food certification system to improve the environment and ensure public health [
6]. Green food refers to the safe and premium edible agricultural products and related processed products that are grown in an ecologically sound environment, are produced according to the green food production standard, adopt the whole-some quality control, and grant the right to use the “green food” logo [
7]. There are two standards for green food: Grade A and Grade AA. Grade A represents a transitional level between conventional and organic food, allowing to use a certain amount of chemical materials, and Grade AA is equivalent to international organic standards [
5]. During the past five years, the Chinese green food sector has been displaying a flourishing vigour and has been growing at an average of 9.2% domestic sales [
7]. In the year 2018, there were a total of 30,932 green food labelled products, 106,523 thousand tons of green food production, and 68.1 billion U.S. dollars of total domestic sales [
7]. Despite the growth in the green food industry, green food market and consumer expenditure shares of green food products are extremely low, which constitute only less than 1% of total Chinese food sales in 2018 [
8]. Therefore, the green food sector shows great potential for further expansion in China.
To effectively respond to the growth of the green food market, it is important to study its consumers’ purchasing behaviours, especially focusing on purchase intention, which is the premise of performed purchase behaviour [
9]. Thus, marketers and academicians need to deeply understand which factors motivate consumers’ intentions to purchase green food in China. However, research related to consumer intentional behaviour towards green food in the Chinese context is still insufficient, as most of the studies have been focused on organic food products [
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16]. For example, Liu et al. [
6] found the specific attributes of safety, health, nutrition, and taste as the key drivers of organic food preferences; among them, safety was the most important factor for consumers to generate buying intentions. The study from McCarthy et al. [
17] reported that purchasing intentions of organic food were motivated by altruistic concerns (i.e., environment and animal welfare concerns) and self-interest (i.e., personal and familial health concerns, food safety concerns). In terms of the green food consumption issue, Wang and Wang [
18] and Zhu et al. [
19] applied the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to study the influence mechanisms in the process of green food purchases, and the TPB constructs (i.e., attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control) were found to have significant effects. Several studies have determined personal characteristic factors (e.g., gender, age, family size, education, income) that influence green food purchase behaviour [
5,
19]. Although prior studies have provided some evidence on the factors of organic and green food consumption, researchers still suggest to verify their impacts and explore additional factors in further research [
6,
20].
Moreover, the upward trend and low market share also can be caused by a phenomenon called the intention–behaviour gap (IBG), whereby a highly positive intention towards behaviour is expressed, followed by not acting in the depicted way owing to different reasons [
21,
22]. The green consumption, which consumers have increasingly perceived as environmentally responsible behaviour, is considered as a strong representation of this gap [
22]. For example, some surveys reported that 30%–50% of consumers have expressed their intentions to purchase sustainable products, whereas only 5% of consumers have completed their actual buying behaviours [
23,
24]. This inconsistent phenomenon is also confirmed by other green studies [
25,
26,
27], whereas most studies have investigated the IBG in the fields of pro-environmental manner and organic food consumption instead of green food. Although the results of organic food can be used for comparison and reference [
5], they still need to be examined and validated in the domain of green food consumption. Moreover, many researchers have argued that the green IBG is still unexplained because of inconclusive results and the lack of systematic research [
22]. Subsequently, researchers call for further investigations to help minimize the gap by exploring factors that hinder consumers from translating their intention into practice [
24,
25].
Furthermore, the emergence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has significantly affected the global food systems of producers, processors, and consumers, at different levels [
28,
29]. Notably, the public’s hygiene behaviours [
30] and consumption patterns have shifted as the coronavirus pandemic has progressed [
31,
32,
33]. The latest study from Ben Hassen et al. [
33] reported that the COVID-19 pandemic could shift consumers’ behaviour in a more sustainable and healthier direction and increase the consumption of local food products because of food safety concerns. Moreover, the results from Xie et al. [
28] revealed that the COVID-19 crisis influenced the respondents’ perceptions and attitudes towards organic food thanks to its safer and healthier characteristics, which can lead to a change in consumers’ future diets. As this infectious disease is new and its lifespan is not known, there is a need to gather more data and information to explore COVID-19 impacts on shifting food consumption patterns. Therefore, considering the safer, healthier, and sustainable characteristics of green food products, there is a critical need to study changes in Chinese consumers’ attitudes and behaviours towards green food to address the potential for long-term health consequences due to behaviour changes during the pandemic. Although some researchers have studied factors that influence purchase intentions and the IBG in green food consumption, the majority of previous studies applied quantitative methods with close-ended questions, which may limit participants in expressing their true motivations, barriers, and perceptions of buying green food products [
34]. However, according to Cohen [
35], qualitative research with consumers can be more systematic, psychological, and innovative, which can reveal the “why” behind consumer behaviour and may explore underlying motives, values, and attitudes towards a particular product. Specifically, the latest research from ElHaffar et al. [
36] has highlighted the importance of qualitative studies and experimental designs in closing the IBG in green consumption. In addition, studying the influence of COVID-19 on consumers’ behaviour is still at a nascent stage. None of the studies have measured green food consumption with a special emphasis on COVID-19 influences in the Chinese context. When considering the continuous involvement in consumers’ lifestyles and consumption patterns, qualitative research with open-ended, discovery-oriented methods is needed to explore green food consumption changes of Chinese consumers during a detrimental global pandemic. Thus, the present study has examined the underlying influences on consumers’ green food consumption from the intention generation phase to the intention execution phase in a Chinese context using a qualitative inquiry.
The three main aims of this study are (i) to explore which factors motivate the intention of consumers to purchase green food, (ii) to investigate which factors prevent consumers from translating their intention into green food purchase behaviour, and (iii) to study the impacts from the COVID-19 crisis for consumers on green food consumption. Our study is based on grounded theory by employing in-depth interviews. The outcome of this research has significant practical implications for different stakeholders including scholars, green food marketers, and policymakers. The research findings can enable stakeholders to comprehend the important role of the IBG and the mechanisms that influence green food consumption of consumers. Furthermore, this study can provide newer insight into the impact of the pandemic crisis on consumers’ green food purchases. Therefore, governments and stakeholders of the green food industry can utilize these findings to develop appropriate public health and marketing strategies to promote healthier lifestyles and green food consumption in the future.
4. Discussion and Implications
During the interviews, researchers asked participants to describe the first three words that they think in terms of green food. ‘’Health’’ was the most frequent term mentioned by consumers, which is in agreement with the results from Ismael and Ploeger [
44]. Our results also confirmed the findings from previous studies, in which “physical health” was one of the most strongly correlated terms with environmentally friendly food products [
44,
45,
46,
47]. In addition, participants agreed with other dimensions, including “intrinsic attributes” (e.g., sensory attributes, nutritional value, less pesticides), “extrinsic attributes” (e.g., high price, safe, sustainability, less pollution), and “psychological and personal aspects” (e.g., better life, enjoyment). Among these dimensions, “high price” and “safe” were the second and third most mentioned words after ‘’health’’. It can be explained that the economic and safe attributes of green food play significant roles in consumers’ green food perception, which also agrees with the findings from previous studies [
6,
25,
60].
When probing factors that drive green food purchase intention, most consumers reported that they had the intention to buy green food because of their health consciousness, which is in line with our previous finding that “health’’ was perceived as the most correlated term of green food by consumers. Moreover, previous studies suggested that the factor of health benefits is the dominant driver behind environmentally friendly food intentional behaviour of consumers [
6,
73,
74,
75]. Therefore, marketers and green food providers should make health benefits the primary focal point when communicating with and convincing consumers to buy green food offerings. Moreover, consumers expressed that they perceived green food with specific attributes of being nutritious, tasty, natural, and of better quality, as well as good packaging. Thereby, these positive perceived attributes of green food products increased their intentions to choose green food. These findings underpin the assertion from most studies [
6,
76,
77,
78] that consumers’ purchase intentions and behaviours towards environmentally friendly food products are closely related to consumers’ perception of product-specific attributes. Marketers can highlight prominent attributes and benefits of green food products to consumers, and acknowledge the potentially detrimental effects of conventional food products. Environmental consciousness emerged as an important driver among consumers in this study, as consumers started to realize their responsibility in dealing with environmental and sustainablility issues. Purchasing green food was seen as pro-environmental behaviour, which can bring long-term benefits and provide better future orientations. This finding is consistent with the results from some studies discussing how environmental concerns have a direct and positive impact on the creation of consumers’ environmentally friendly food purchase intention [
53,
79,
80]. Therefore, marketers and policymakers should properly communicate the environmental benefits to consumers. For example, the use of in-store digital advertisements to display how green food is grown and processed so the products can promote consumers’ senses of social responsibility for protecting and pursuing long-term sustainability. In addition, social influence was found to play a significant role in determining the creation of consumers’ green food intention in the investigation. Some interviewees reported that they preferred to follow a green lifestyle, similar to some bloggers and celebrities, which is consistent with the findings from Sogari et al. [
81]. Therefore, marketers should pay more attention to celebrity and social media platform endorsements to positively guide green food consumption. The results also validate the findings from Qi and Ploeger [
82], in which consumers with a Chinese cultural background were inclined to conform similarly with their reference groups, and focused more on their social status, which has been strongly predominant in their intentional green food purchases. Hence, marketers should emphasize the importance of interpersonal interactions and portray green consumers as high-status consumers through future marketing strategies. Furthermore, consumers’ family structures were observed to hold a large degree of importance in their green food intentions, as they had more willingness to buy for their children and elders, which supports the opinions from Liu et al. [
6] and Zhang and Wu [
59]. However, others studies reported that household and family structures did not have a significant impact [
83,
84], especially the study from Annunziata et al. [
85], which showed that increasing household size reduces the likelihood of buying local and organic products in Italy. This disparity may be due to different family planning policies in different countries, as the majority of couples have one or two children in China. Thus, marketers should integrate actual conditions in China to develop and produce special products for target groups, and highlight their characteristics on the packaging to attract consumers’ interests. Some participants reported that positive shopping experiences motivated them to generate green food buying intentions. Thus, green food companies should intensify training for their salesmen and understand the important role of sales employees in creating valuable customers relationships and satisfaction. Additionally, green food stores or green food counters should provide customers with pleasant, comfortable, and high-end surroundings and professional services. Interestingly, our study discovered that promotional activity is another significant driving factor, whereas these findings do not yield results similar to previous studies from Ngobo [
86] and Van Doorn and Verhoef [
87], who reported a negative impact during environmentally friendly food consumption. A possible explanation is that most consumers know the premium attributes of green food product quality and are willing to purchase green food when sales promotions are attractive. Therefore, marketers should make proper promotion strategies to attract new customers and provide rewards to existing customers.
Moreover, most of the consumers presented positive attitudes towards green food in this study, whereas the results indicate that consumers’ actual purchase behaviour fell short of their purchase intentions to buy green food. Therefore, their purchase behaviour was not univocally consistent with attitudes and intentions, thus presenting the prevalent existence of the IBG phenomena in consumers’ green food consumption. These findings demonstrate that green or organic food markets are still suffering this disparity between favourable intention towards sustainable behaviour, which supports the results from Aschemann-Witzel and Zielke [
88], Ismael and Ploeger [
44], and Vermeir and Verbeke [
89]. When probing the IBG of consumers making purchasing decisions of green food products, high price, unavailability, mistrust issues, and limited knowledge were identified as major factors contributing to this gap. This is consistent with the study of an attitude–intention–behaviour gap in green consumption from ElHaffar et al. [
36]. Hence, these factors show a similarly important impact of the green gap despite the diversity of green products or green behaviours in different contexts. Specifically, a high price was the most significant factor in preventing consumers from transforming their intentions into buying more expensive green food products, which is widely confirmed by previous studies showing that a premium price of environmentally friendly food products has the strongest negative effect on a consumers’ final purchase [
21,
25,
44,
60,
61]. While facing this high price gap, it is suggested that the implication for the green food sector is to engage in further efforts to reduce the high price image of green food as well as improve the product differentiation of the green food products. Meanwhile, the government should make relevant policies and strategies to reduce the prices of green food products and make these products more attractive and affordable to consumers. For instance, the government can issue preferential policies of monetary aids and tax cuts for relevant enterprises engaged in the production, processing, and sales of green food, particularly for enterprises in a transition period from conventional products to green products. In addition, there are many links and costs regarding traditional green food marketing channel patterns (e.g., agents–wholesalers–retailers), which leads to higher prices of green food products. Therefore, marketers and producers can apply smart supply chains, scientific procurement management systems, and new network marketing channel strategies to reduce their costs and improve their effectiveness. Moreover, these results confirm that perceived unavailability issues indeed acted as one factor in triggering a gap in green food consumption, which is in agreement with the results from other studies [
25,
44,
63]. Although the green food market has existed for decades in China, it is still in the exploration and development stages, and there remains a sizable gap compared with fully developed, mature environmentally friendly food markets (e.g., organic markets in Germany). Thus, increasing the supply and variety of green food products in regular supermarkets and local community shops is an effective strategy to provide convenient availability and better selections. Online sale is a good strategy to widen the availability of green food, thus marketers should take full advantage of the internet to successfully expand green food consumption. Furthermore, trust crises have been mentioned as another main factor in many previous studies [
6,
10,
21,
82,
90] as well as in this study. Therefore, effective solutions should extinguish the severe mistrust issues among Chinese consumers. To increase the degree of consumers’ trust in green food products, the government initially should increase their political functions, increase efforts in supervision, and establish strict laws and regulations to ensure sound standards and quality control of green food products. Marketers can properly communicate information about quality assurance to consumers using labels and certifications from government-approved third-party agencies to create awareness and compete for consumer trust. Limited knowledge was identified as an important obstacle for reducing consumers’ green purchases, which is also confirmed by previous studies [
6,
72]. Hence, it is essential to educate and inform consumers about the characteristics of green food products, the certification process, the differences between green food products and other products, and all other features that could be significant for consumers to accept these products and make rational purchasing decisions. Marketers can apply modern approaches to conduct educational promotions, such as posting promotional videos on popular media platforms (e.g., WeChat and TikTok). Additionally, while there are still no well-known green food brands (e.g., organic brand ALNATURA in the European market) that exist in the Chinese domestic market, breeding brand name green food products should be taken seriously to promote green food markets.
Regarding the impact of COVID-19, approximately two-thirds of consumers reported that the pandemic has increased their green food purchase intentions because of their growing health concerns. This is in agreement with results from Ben Hassen et al. [
33] and Xie et al. [
28], in that the COVID-19 crisis influenced respondents’ perceptions of health and risk, which in turn changed consumers’ sensitivity and beliefs and resulted in a further increase in organic food consumption. However, these increasing intentions did not increase the final amount of green food purchases. Green food purchases have reduced especially during the outbreak of COVID-19, despite having high purchase intentions, mainly because of issues of unavailability, price, and panic. In the early stages of the global pandemic, food supply chains were disrupted as a result of labour shortages, movement restrictions, and disruptions to transportation networks. Meanwhile, the majority of people complied to stay at home to reduce the possibility of spreading infectious disease, and many supermarkets and shops shortened their business hours to limit the spread of COVID-19 cases. Thus, the unavailability problem was significant to limit consumers’ green food purchases. Additionally, some respondents indicated that the pandemic had brought the individuals several negative psychological effects, which is consistent with findings specifically in a Chinese context [
91]. In terms of food consumption, some consumers had become more price-sensitive, and their demand for income elastic products (e.g., green food) sharply declined as a result of a loss of household income and panic buying during the pandemic. Therefore, faced with increasing willingness and existing challenges, the green food industry should initially launch a comprehensive investigation and build practical measures of supply and demand problems that are influenced by the pandemic. If a second wave of the virus is experienced, adjusts to the initial demand shock, building greater supply chain resilience against potential supply-side shocks, and preventing the upswing in prices are key for the green food industry to ensure the availability and affordability for consumer green food purchases. Specifically, online shopping and grocery delivery services should be expanded and cooperate with famous e-commerce platforms (e.g., Taobao, Jingdong) to produce low-cost pricing strategies, enhance distribution channels, and strengthen promotional abilities, in order to enhance their competitiveness in the food market. Furthermore, this study’s findings can provide some theoretical implications for existing prevalent models whose constructs are easily influenced by the outcomes from the pandemic, such as the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) [
9]. Hence, researchers should consider intervention efficacy or moderating effects of the outcomes of COVID-19 on the path in these related models. Even though COVID-19 may end in future, the impact of the COVID-19 factor can still be referred to in some similar events and factors.