The future urban consumer: attitudes and perceptions towards new food technologies

Plant & Food Research is working to develop new plants and growing systems for future consumers as part of its Hua Ki Te Ao – Horticulture Goes Urban research strategy. Direction leader, Dr Samantha Baldwin, says when developing new food systems, it’s critical to consider consumer attitudes towards these technologies.

“For a technology to be successful it needs to be accepted by consumers, so our consumer research team have an important role to play in helping us understand what the barriers and drivers of acceptance are.”

Future Urban Consumer programme leader, Dr Denise Conroy, says over the last four years her team has been undertaking a range of quantitative and qualitative studies. This has included running over 80 focus groups with more than 500 residents in Australia, New Zealand, Viet Nam and Singapore. Consumers in these markets were asked about their views on gene edited and GMO technologies, cell-cultured foods, robotic technologies and controlled environment agriculture systems, such as vertical farming.

Denise Conroy says they found acceptance levels are almost identical between consumers in New Zealand and Australia. Controlled environment agriculture was the most accepted technology, with about 62 percent of surveyed NZ and AU consumers agreeing they’d be willing to purchase produce grown in this way. Meanwhile GE technologies were the most rejected - about 43 percent of NZ and AU survey respondents were willing to purchase this type of produce. Potential reasons for rejection included product quality concerns and doubts about the necessity of the new technology.

Denise says survey work in Viet Nam and Singapore is ongoing, but initial focus groups have indicated there is stronger support across the board for emerging agricultural technologies in these countries. Dr Conroy says part of the reason for this is that these countries historically have had lower food self-sufficiency rates, whereas Australia and New Zealand are large exporting nations that grow and farm well beyond what is needed to supply their own populations.

“If you grow up in a country with food scarcity, you have very different attitudes to food than if you grow up in a country where you have food abundance, so it’s important we understand cultural contexts and the influence they have on consumer attitudes.”

Caption: The Stakeholder and Consumer Research Team. Pictured from left to right; Jenny Young, Zoe Qu, Ivy Gan and Denise Conroy.

The team is now building on this previous focus group research, with a comprehensive international survey spanning New Zealand, Australia, Viet Nam, Japan, China, Singapore, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates currently in progress.

“We’re really excited about exploring this further, as these are some of New Zealand’s most significant export markets worth billions of dollars in export revenue annually - so understanding consumer views in these countries will be really valuable as we consider what the future of food production could look like,” says Denise.

Denise says the already completed in-market studies have also highlighted how the way technologies are named and framed can have a significant bearing on consumer preference. The team has so far found that most consumers do not differentiate between gene edited and GMO technologies. Gene editing tools modify the existing genetic material to make changes, while GMOs introduce new genetic configurations from other organisms.

Recently published research using the information gathered during the Future Urban Consumer programme has also shown that technologies which changed the physical and internal qualities of food itself, such as gene editing or GMO, made people feel less in control, and less likely to want to buy that produce. On the other hand, technologies that changed the growing environment, such as controlled environment agriculture systems, didn’t provoke the same level of resistance.

“This kind of research is not done very often, but it's important because it’s clear the conditions applied to different food technologies and the messaging around them affect how we think and feel, and that can influence what we choose to buy," says Dr Conroy.