There is a pressing need for a transition toward more sustainable diets, which has become a shared priority for both consumers and businesses. Innovation is becoming increasingly widespread across all facets of the food supply chain. This innovation spans various domains related to production, including sustainable cultivation methods as well as new food technologies like gene editing, new product development like functional foods, and revitalizing underutilized and genetically diverse varieties to preserve biodiversity. However, not all innovative efforts are accepted by consumers and survive in markets. The interwoven and long agri-food supply chains often obscure the feedback loop between production and consumption. Consequently, it is important to understand to what extent consumers embrace these food innovations and form new eating habits. This review aims to investigate the consumer response to novel foods, focusing on behavioral factors, which have yet to receive as much attention as sensory factors. Peer-reviewed empirical articles from the last decade are examined inductively to develop a bird’s-eye view of the behavioral barriers to and drivers of consumer acceptance of novel foods. In addition, strategies to overcome the identified challenges associated with the behavioral barriers are reviewed and examined. Based on this, the study links cognitive biases with behavioral factors influencing consumer acceptance of novel foods. This study concludes that the inconvenience associated with abandoning established eating habits is typically perceived as a loss, and avoiding this inconvenience is deemed more worth the risk than the potential gains associated with novel food consumption. This study suggests that framing and placing pro-diversity labels could serve as effective behavioral interventions for marketing strategists and food policymakers.

This study aims to identify the methods and associated indicators that are commonly used in value chain analyses (VCA) and to determine the areas of interest that have been excluded. Value chain analysis generally includes four different dimensions, which are institutional/functional, economic/financial, social, and environmental. This study has two main sources of literature. The first is the guidelines and the other is case studies on value chain analysis. The case study review is limited by the time between 2000 and 2022. The results showed that the researchers mainly focused on the institutional/functional analysis of the value chain, which is the first step of the analysis. Studies were mostly concentrated on the mapping of value chains, which includes the mapping of agents, core activities, and the marketing channels and flows of products. The second important area of interest is economic/financial analysis. Value added analysis is a top research area on the economical side of the value chain (VC). Consumer behavior and financial analysis are also included in the case studies. The research on consumer behavior of the value chain analysis has focused on the preferences, attitudes, and behaviors of the consumers. Financial analysis is another area of interest which generally concentrates on the cost of intermediate inputs, total output value, net present value, internal rate of return, cash flows and cost of fixed assets, and break-even point. The social and environmental sides of the value chain have been studied with less attention. This is much more important for a sustainable food VC.

Günden, C., Şahin, A., Miran, B. and Yildirim, İ. 2010. Technical, allocative and economic efficiencies of Turkish dairy farms: An application of data envelopment analysis. J. Appl. Anim. Res., 37: 213–216. Efficiencies of farms were measured using data envolepment analysis (DEA) on 87 dairy farms in İzmir, Turkey. Technical, allocative and economic efficiencies were 0.615, 0.673 and 0.488, respectively. Only three farms were efficient. 62% of farms had decreasing return to scale. It is concluded that the current gross production value could be preserved while decreasing the number of cows, labor (man-days) and maize silage (kg) by 50.29, 45.17 and 42.42%, respectively.

This study draws attention to the potential benefits of leveraging food values to amplify the impact of nutrition education programs. The study has collected data via a telephone survey from 417 randomly selected residents in Guilford County in the state of North Carolina. In our analysis, we have identified and used three underlying dimensions (ethical, social environmental and sensory) that summarize and capture the meaning of food-related values instead of a list of food values commonly used in the literature. Researchers have then used these dimensions as clustering variables to produce three segments from the data: value-positive, value-negative, and hedonic. Results show that residents in the value positive segment had positive perceptions of all values, those in value negative segment had negative perception of all values, and those in the hedonic segment had only positive perception of sensory values. A key finding is that value-positive residents have healthier food-related lifestyles and food-related behaviors than residents in the other segments. Interventions should focus on value-negative and hedonic residents and emphasize value-based education tailored to strengthening social/environmental and ethical food values. To ensure success, interventions should graft healthier lifestyle habits and behaviors on familiar behaviors and lifestyle.