Understanding consumer beliefs and choices related to food safety: a qualitative study in urban Ethiopia.

Objective: Provide an in-depth examination of consumers' food safety beliefs and practices to draw implications for interventions to improve nutrition and food safety in Ethiopia.

Design: Adapted Focused Ethnographic Study approach using in-person semi-structured interviews and free-listing exercises, in two iterative phases.

Setting: A traditional food market in Hawassa, a mid-sized city.

Participants: Forty-six market shoppers, selected randomly in line with quotas for age and gender.

Results: Consumers did not clearly differentiate between quality and safety, seeing them through connected concepts such as 'freshness'. While most respondents had some understanding of the causes of unsafe food, they did not generally worry about becoming ill themselves and felt food safety risks were easily mitigated through in-home behaviours. Thus, food safety practices were not a main motivator of market or vendor choice. There was no evidence that food safety concerns led consumers to prefer packaged, processed food or to avoid consuming fresh foods.

Conclusions: The study offers novel depth and detail on a topic of strong policy relevance. While building on an encouraging base of understanding of food safety, there remains considerable scope for increasing knowledge, particularly with regard to the need to procure safe food as opposed to expecting household-level practices to mitigate all safety risks. Motivating customers to give food safety factors more consideration when making food purchasing decisions, such as by leveraging emotion-based communication from trusted messengers to elevate the issue's salience in their minds, may contribute to improvements in food safety in low-income countries such as Ethiopia.