Resilience effects in food consumption behaviour at the time of Covid-19: perspectives from Italy

“…in daily purchasing behaviours can be interpreted as a result of socio-ecological resilience, which is related to the opportunities that a disturbance opens in terms of the reorganizing of structures and processes, the renewal of the system and the emergence of new trajectories (Folke, 2006).”

“Utilitarian motivations result from some type of conscious pursuit of an intended consequence and are directed toward satisfying a functional need (Babin et al., 1994).”

“Since barriers to online shopping were broken down for a substantial part of consumers, also the most resistance to change, the adoption curve for e-commerce has been accelerated by the crisis and it can be presumed that this evolution will last long after the Covid-19 crisis (Hobbs, 2020).”

“But also other events put at risk consumers' health, for example the shut-down of school catering exposed children to unhealthy food, especially for lower income consumers (Rundle et al., 2020).”

“This tendency is aimed at particular kinds of foods whose consumption evokes a psychologically comfortable and pleasurable state for a person, as the category of comfort foods (Wansink et al., 2003).”

“…in the US there has been a rush in stockpiling essentials that emptied groceries of several products (such as milk, meat, and toilet paper) (Kirk and Rifkin, 2020), to the point that the American President was asked to reassure the population about the future availability of products…”

“This tendency is due also to a changed opportunity costs of time for most of the consumers, who rebuilt their daily routine (Cran fi eld, 2020; Zwanka and Buff, 2020).”

“Thus, it is possible to suppose that the behaviours changed according more to the perception of risk than the risk itself (Lobb et al., 2007).”

“Actually, the planning horizons for grocery shopping have been substantially expanded (Cranfield, 2020), in order to acquire a sense of control over the crisis period (Loxton et al., 2020).”

“As far as the shopping basket is concerned, considering sales occurred from early March to mid-April 2020, it is possible to observe other changes which mirror the evolution of consumption motives among consumers (Hall et al., 2020).”

“In Italy, the rare presence of stockpiling behaviours might be explained by the social trust in institutions, which is a relevant factor in in fl uencing consumers' food choices (Carfora et al., 2019; Del Giudice, Cavallo and Vecchio, 2018).”

“This is con fi rmed by other studies which found that buying more indulgent and comfort food also characterised the consumer behaviour of other countries as Spain (Laguna et al., 2020).”

“On the one hand, it is possible to highlight the resiliency of the sector in providing stable access to food but, on the other hand, the fragility of the supply chain has also been revealed (Mollenkopf et al., 2020).”

“Also in China several cases of panic buying have been highlighted (Wang et al., 2020).”

“These tendencies partially shadowed vegetarian and healthy food preferences that were largely expanding before the crisis (Sadler, 2004; Ueland et al., 2020).”

“This helped to foster a digital transformation also for small farms (Butu et al., 2020).”

“Several scholars, dealing with Covid-19 issue, have referred to such a source of information developing research on available data for outlining some early analyses (Aldaco et al., 2020; Arellana et al., 2020; De la Hoz-Restrepo et al., 2020; Sun et al., 2020).”

“Several scholars, dealing with Covid-19 issue, have referred to such a source of information developing research on available data for outlining some early analyses (Aldaco et al., 2020; Arellana et al., 2020; De la Hoz-Restrepo et al., 2020; Sun et al., 2020).”

“In addition, food offering is recognised as a means to positively affect both the provider and recipient (Hamburg et al., 2014).”

“This in turn may lead consumers to preventive behaviours, such as concentrating all resources to store commodities, medicine, and food (Long and Khoi, 2020).”

“The Covid-19 crisis led to a situation of health emergency that is likely to trigger an uncontrollable emotion of anxiety (Dammeyer, 2020).”

“…new “ normality ” of distribution, indeed, it will still be better to move goods rather than people, and for this reason those issues linked to the last mile logistic and to viable delivery models have to be tackled to rethink an economic model in line with ecosystem sustainability (Kotler, 2020).”

“Actually, the planning horizons for grocery shopping have been substantially expanded (Cran fi eld, 2020), in order to acquire a sense of control over the crisis period (Loxton et al., 2020).”

“Given that during the lockdown period people reported both an increase in negative and a decrease in positive affect (Aymerich-Franch, 2020), the notable increase in cooking and baking could have been used as an emotional regulation strategy.”

“The shelter effect suggests that in a situation of emergency, staple foods regain their importance in the food basket and this partially inverted the tendency of consumers in increasingly differentiating their food purchases (Marinelli et al., 2015).”

“Online services also mediated the sales made by short food supply chains (e-commerce and instant messaging), which dynamically constituted micro-networks which supplied food in a complementary or alternative to usual way (Calori and Federici, 2020).”

“Thus, the increase in sales of Italian retail firms during the pandemic is because these offered their products through the online market [78].”

“In response to the crisis, governments in many countries have taken a series of procedures aimed at reducing the effects of the epidemic such as lockdown and social distancing (Cavallo et al., 2020; Perdana et al., 2020; Verma et al., 2020).”

“Worth noting, however, is the relative stability of small independent shops— typically neighbourhood grocery stores and greengrocers’; these shops saw an overall increase in sales during the lockdown, as people could not (or did not want to) shop at large retailers [74].”