Attitude towards eating “green”: Do consumer consciousness, healthy lifestyle, and value orientation matter?

Due to the increasing pressure on environmental deterioration, consumers have begun to be more concerned over sustaining green environment and living a healthy lifestyle. Consumers have started to worry about the negative effects of chemical residues on their health and on the environment in conventional production methods. As a result, organic food and products which produced without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, genetically modified organisms, food additives, sewage sludge and others are perceived by consumers as safer and healthier, and expected to have greater nutritional value. Hence, the organic food market is growing because more people are willing to eat “green” as they lose confidence in the quality of food, resulting from the conventional method of production. Although the studies conducted to understand the organic food markets has certainly been on the increase, the information about consumer attitude towards eating “green” that helps firms to assess the feasibility of entering or expanding their operations in the green market is still not widely discovered. Therefore, this paper proposes a conceptual framework to examine the effect of consumer consciousness, healthy lifestyle, and value orientation on attitudes towards eating “green” simultaneously in a single study in Malaysia context. Green” is referred to the locally grown organic food and products in this research. Besides, the mediating role of healthy lifestyle in the relationship between consumer consciousness and attitudes towards eating “green” is examined in this study. An individual's healthy lifestyle that focuses on physical health-related activities may increase the effect of consumer health and environmental consciousness on their attitudes towards eating “green”. The result of this study is expected to provide a better understanding for marketers to better design marketing promotion strategies for organically grown food and product consumption, given that the consumer lifestyle and value orientation are the psychographic variables that give a clearer orientation to identify green consumer segment.