Ready-to-Eat Food

Choosing something to eat is something we do every day. We may choose to prepare and cook our meals ourselves and we may choose not to. There are situations when a visit to a restaurant is preferred to cooking. There are also situations when take-away and ready meals are the best solutions to fulfill our needs and wants.

 READY-TO-EAT FOOD

Food is becoming a significant culture marker due to various lifestyle changes such as greater media attention, more eating out and wider exposure to foreign cuisines. This brings a change in consumers buying behaviour especially in terms of food consumed. Supermarkets nowadays stock packages for the microwave oven frozen foods, and pre-prepared, complete chilled dishes- that our grandparents would have marvelled at, and these packages permit meals representing most of the cuisines of the world to be eaten at home. These pre-prepared pre-cooked food are termed as ready meals that are considered as the “ultimate processed  foods” with very high value addition, since they offer the convenience of “eating off” the shelf” eliminating the kitchen drudgery associated with making a meal at home. 

Ready-to-eat food

Various ready meals are considered better over others as they do not contain any chemical preservatives and remain shelf-stable without refrigeration for at least one year. These changes are bringing a new wave in processed food industry with a term called convenience food.

READY-TO-EAT FOOD AND IT'S FORMS

Convenience food, or tertiary processed food, is food that is commercially prepared (often through processing) to optimize ease of consumption. Such food is usually ready to eat without further preparation. It may also be easily portable, have a long shelf life, or offer a combination of such convenient traits. Although restaurant meals meet this definition, the term is seldom applied to them. Types of convenience foods can vary by country and geographic region.

Ready-to-eat food

Convenience foods can include products such as candy; beverages such as soft drinks, juices and milk; fast-food; nuts, fruits and vegetables in fresh or preserved states; processed meats and cheeses; and canned products such as soups and pasta dishes. Additional convenience foods include frozen pizza, chips such as potato chips, pretzels and cookies. These products are often sold in portion controlled, single serve packaging designed for portability.

READY-TO-EAT FOOD AND BRAND AWARENESS

Brand awareness means the ability of a consumer to recognize and recall a brand in different situations (Aaker, 1996). Brand awareness consists of brand recall and brand recognition. A brand name offers a symbol that can assist consumers to identify service providers and to predict service results (Herbig & Milewicz, 1993; Janiszewski & Van Osselaer, 2000; Turley & Moore, 1995). Brand awareness plays an important role on purchase intention because consumers tend to buy a familiar and well known product (Keller, 1993; Macdonald & Sharp,2000). Brand awareness plays an important role on purchase intention because consumers tend to buy a familiar and well known product (Keller, 1993; Macdonald & Sharp,2000). Brand awareness can help consumers to recognize a brand from a product category and make purchase decision (Percy & Rossiter, 1992). Brand awareness has a great influence on selections and can be a prior consideration base in a product category (Hoyer & Brown, 1990). Brand awareness also acts as a critical factor in the consumer purchase intention, and certain brands will accumulate in consumers’ mind to influence consumer purchase decision. A product with a high level of brand awareness will receive higher consumer preferences because it has higher market share and quality evaluation.

Ready-to-eat food

Being so much popular among the customers, with a high rate of growth, the Ready-to-Eat food industry is also facing tough competition. A recent report from market research firm Packaged Facts titled “Prepared Foods and Ready-to-Eat Foods at Retail: The New Competition to Foodservice” noted grocery’s gain amid the restaurant industry’s recessionary struggles.

  v Preference for Ready-to-eat food

In marketing literature, the word preference means the desirability or choice of an alternative. Preferences are above all behavioural tendencies (Zajonc and Markus, 1982). Brand preference is defined variously as the consumer’s predispositions toward a brand that varies depending on the salient beliefs that are activated at a given time; the consumer biases toward a certain brand; the extent to which a consumer favours one brand over another. 

Ready-to-eat food

For this study a working definition for brand preference is offered: “the biased behavioural tendencies reflecting the consumer’s predisposition toward a brand”.

  v  Perceived quality of Ready-to-eat food

Perceived quality is a result of consumers’ subjective judgment on a product (Zeithaml, 1988; Dodds et al., 1991; Aaker, 1991). Bhuian (1997) also consider perceived quality is a judgment on the consistency of product specification or an evaluation on added value of a product. The differences between objective quality and perceived quality lie in that objective quality has a pre-design standard to a product, and perceived quality is influenced by internal and external product attributes which is an evaluation basis for consumers (Olshavsky, 1985; Zeithaml, 1988).

Ready-to-eat food

Kan (2002) points out that objective quality is that consumers will use their experience and knowledge to evaluate overall product benefit, function, durability, technology and reliability when consumers purchase a product. Perceived quality is a consumer judgment on the accumulative product benefits and a subjective feeling on product quality.

  v  Purchase intention for Ready-to-eat food

     Engel, Blackwell and Miniard (1995) present a model of consumer purchase decision-making which divides the consumer purchase decision process into five stages: (1) problem recognition, (2) information search, (3) alternative evaluation, (4) purchase decision, (5) post-purchase behavior. Mowen and Minor (2001) maintain that consumer decision making are a series of processing results from perceiving problems, searching for solutions, evaluating alternatives, and making decisions.

Ready-to-eat food

Purchase intention can be divided into unplanned buying, partially planned buying and fully planned buying. Consumer purchase intention is considered as a subjective inclination toward a product and can be an important index to predict consumer behavior (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Zeithaml (1988) uses ‘possible to buy’, ‘intended to buy’ and ‘considered to buy’ to measure purchase intention.