Do Health Consciousness and Perceived Benefits Play a Role in Motivating Buyers to Purchase Functional Foods?

Functional foods gained more attention with their benefits in the post-pandemic era, and this has caused the demand for functional foods to increase dramatically in the post-pandemic era. Empirically, the factors determining consumers to purchase functional foods are widely investigated. However, inconsistent findings regarding their effect on purchase intention remain in the literature. Besides, studies considering health consciousness and the perceived benefits of purchasing functional foods in a single study are rare. Therefore, further study was required to re-examine these factors' effect on the functional foods eater's purchase intention. Through purposive sampling, 167 functional food buyers in Malaysia participated in this study, and their responses were further analysed using the partial least squared-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The result revealed that only three factors (attitudes, subjective norms, and health consciousness) significantly affected functional food purchase intention, while perceived behavioural control and perceived benefits had an insignificant effect. The importance-performance map analysis (IPMA) result further showed that the effort and resources should be concentrated on the subjective norms due to unsatisfactory performance. The theoretical and practical implications of the study are further discussed in this study, and it's expected to be beneficial for the stakeholders to cultivate the purchase intention of functional foods. For instance, stakeholders such as government agencies and businesses must maintain their existing attitudes and health consciousness efforts as the current performance for both constructs is satisfactory. However, more improvement efforts and resources should be concentrated on subjective norms. It is one of the most influential constructs in determining the buyers’ purchase intention on functional foods, but its performance is unsatisfactory.