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Explaining Chinese Consumers’ Green Food Purchase Intentions during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Extended Theory of Planned Behaviour
Open accessAbstract
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has strongly influenced consumers’ habits and behaviours, creating a more sustainable and healthier era of consumption. Hence, there is a potential for further expanding the green food sector in China. The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) is one widely used framework to explain consumers’ food choices. Considering consumers’ internal norms, their perceptions of green food attributes, and the shifting consumer behaviour, our study has extended the TPB framework (E-TPB) by adding constructs of moral attitude, health consciousness, and the impact of COVID-19 (IOC). The results of structural equation modelling among 360 functional samples revealed that the E-TPB model has a superior explanatory and predictive power, compared with the original TPB model regarding Chinese consumers’ green food buying intentions in the current and post-pandemic periods. The path analysis demonstrated that attitude, perceived behavioural control, moral attitude, health consciousness, and IOC have significant positive effects on green food purchase intentions. However, the association between subjective norm and purchase intention varies within the TPB and E-TPB models, which showed a non-significant impact in E-TPB. These findings can generate more suitable managerial implications to promote green food consumption in China during the current and post-pandemic periods.
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“This psychological factor directly affects the purchase intention and operates through various psychological and social mechanisms [2,43,66].”
From Psychological Determinants of Healthy Food Purchase Intention: An Integrative Model Based on Health Consciousness (2025) · cites this paper as [2]
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“with heightened health consciousness emerging as a key driver of purchase decisions [1,2,3,4,5,6]”
From Psychological Determinants of Healthy Food Purchase Intention: An Integrative Model Based on Health Consciousness (2025) · cites this paper as [2]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Qi, X., & Ploeger, A.
- Affiliations
- University of Kassel (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Qi, Xin
- Venue
- Foods
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2021-05-26
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1200
- ISSN
- 2304-8158 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8227529
- OpenAlex
- W3164929864
- Cited by
- 146
- References
- 63
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 24 · 2024: 38 · 2023: 28 · 2022: 34 · 2021: 7
- FWCI
- 24.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Foods (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Kobra (Universitätsbibliothek Kassel) (cc-by)
- Funders
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Universität Kassel
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Marketing › Environmental Sustainability in Business
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant Science › Organic Food and Agriculture
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Consumer behavior in food and health
- Keywords
- green food, purchase intention, theory of planned behavior, COVID-19 pandemic, moral attitudes, health consciousness, perceived behavioral control, subjective norms, attitudes, green food consumption, Chinese consumers, sustainable consumption
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