Consumer Behavior and Food Choice

Dear Colleagues,

Understanding consumer behavior is one of the major challenges for food managers and food companies in order to meet consumers’ needs and demand. Nowadays, consumers care about what they eat, how their food is produced, and the impact that food production and consumption have on the environment and society, but consumers do not behave in a homogeneous way and differ in the way they make decisions about food. In addition, today consumers are more demanding when making food choices, and previous research highlights health, convenience, functionality, and pleasure as the main drivers of food selection. Similarly, there are multiple factors potentially influencing food choice that could be product-based or consumer-based, such as consumer underlying motivations, food involvement, lifestyle, and cultural and social aspects, as well as food products’ packaging, labelling, price, country of origin, and even appearance.

This Special Issue invites researchers to submit high-quality original research contributions and reviews on consumer behavior in food selection, food consumption, and purchase decisions, including “hot topics”, innovative research perspectives, innovations in research methodologies, and insights from interdisciplinary fields.

This Special Issue welcomes original research that covers all aspects of consumer behavior related to food choice, and potentially encompasses topics such as food consumption behavior; consumer multisensory perception; healthy, nutritional, or quality food choices; hedonic and functional food selection; as well as social and cultural aspects of food choice.

Prof. Dr. Cristina Calvo-Porral
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Foods is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.