COVID-19 from a Consumer Perspective: Using Behavioral Insights to Design Effective Policies for Food Consumption in the Pandemic

Within the scope of the project, determining the food values, health awareness, sustainable and healthy eating behaviors of consumers and their attitudes towards COVID-19; segmenting consumers according to their attitudes and profiling each segment; It is aimed to design policies targeting concrete behavioral changes that will enable consumers to gain healthy eating habits by using behavioral insights (nudge) in the COVID-19 outbreak. In the project, eight food values ​​that are generally accepted by the society were determined by using the data obtained from 1050 consumers in 12 regions classified according to NUTS1 throughout Turkey: naturalness, safety, environmental effects, nutritional value, origin (origin), taste, fair production and price. It has been observed that 54.3% of consumers are indifferent to these values. In order to determine the attitude of the society towards the epidemic, the COVID-19 Attitude Scale was developed by considering the emotional, cognitive and behavioral components. Accordingly, the COVID-19 attitude of the society was evaluated with the help of six basic dimensions: Actuality, trust/satisfaction, insensitivity/comfort, anxiety/fear, spending quality time at home, and the social environment as a source of information. Consumers are divided into four segments based on the COVID-19 attitude: ignorant, confused, anxious, and compliant. It has been determined that the target audience in the fight against the epidemic is the ignorant segment, which constitutes 46.6% of the consumers. In the project, the relationships between food values ​​and COVID-19 attitudes and nutritional behaviors were examined. As a result, it has been determined that those who do not care about food values ​​have low health awareness and do not care about sustainable healthy nutrition and COVID-19. It has been deemed appropriate to target consumers who are indifferent to food values ​​in the design of policies aiming at food values-oriented nutritional behavior change using behavioral insights. Policy interventions have been developed that focus on making changes in the environments in which consumers make food purchase and consumption decisions, taking into account the principles of convenience, attention, social and timeliness. For this reason, offering value-oriented products as readily available options in public institutions, private sector and university cafeterias; increasing visibility, accessibility and availability on grocery shelves and restaurant menus; It is recommended to use social norms for behavioral change in consumers who are not interested in values. These interventions are considered feasible and cost-effective.