Exploring the role of food origin as a source of meanings for consumers and as a determinant of consumers' actual food choices

This article seeks to contribute to food consumption literature by tackling certain shortcomings in the country of origin studies both qualitatively and quantitatively. As regards to the meanings consumers attach to food of various origins the findings show that Finnish consumers associate partly overlapping partly distinct cognitive, affective and normative meanings with Swedish, German and French food. In turn, the results of the real food choice experiment revealed that activating domestic origin cognitively actually results in favoring foreign food products while activating domestic origin affectively leads to favoring of domestic food products. Authors review and analyze several alternative explanations for the main effect. The article concludes with a discussion highlighting theoretical and managerial implications of the results of the two investigations.