A revisit to the role of gender, age, subjective and objective knowledge in consumers’ attitudes towards organic food

We identified the major determinants of consumers’ attitudes towards organic food, including subjective and objective knowledge, sources of information and socio-demographic profiles of consumers in Lebanon. We used quantitative analysis for data collected from 371 questionnaires in the city of Beirut. The results indicate that consumers have, in general, low confidence in their knowledge of organic food, despite being well informed about it. Whilst objective knowledge has a significant positive effect on consumers’ attitudes towards organic food, subjective knowledge has a negative effect. Women are more aware than men about organic food and younger consumers tend to have higher objective knowledge than mature ones. As subjective and objective knowledge and the resulting attitudes of consumers are influenced by sources of information, marketing campaigns and strategies need to emphasize the fact that the attributes of organic food are distinguished from those of conventional foods, using credible information channels. While subjective and objective knowledge of organic food have not been studied previously in our target region, we believe that unlike most previous research which studied the role of knowledge in organic food acceptance and consumption, our study aims to assess and explore this relationship using two different variables (subjective and objective knowledge).