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Introduction
In recent years, the importance of environmental protection and food safety incidents around the world have raised consumers’ health awareness and caused organic food to become a focus of public interest. The organic food market is growing fast, and consumer behaviour has spurred many scholars to conduct research. For example, Gil et al. (2000) analysed two Spanish regions and people’s willingness to pay a high premium for organic items in Spain. Williams and Hammitt (2001) questioned 700 conventional and organic food buyers on food safety risks in the Boston area. Gifford and Bernard (2011) examined the effect of defining “organic” and “natural” on people’s willingness to pay a premium for organic (vs natural) chicken in Delaware. Thøgersen and Zhou (2012) studied Chinese consumers’ motivation to buy organic food. Suh et al. (2012) explored the influence of Korean consumers’ perceptions and attitudes towards organic food on their willingness to buy it.
In 2012, there were approximately 1.9 million organic food producers, of which Asia accounts for 36 per cent, Africa comprises 30 per cent, and Europe makes up 17 per cent (Patil, 2015). This paper uses literature reviews and the opinions of Taiwanese consumers to perform an empirical study, beginning with Asian and Taiwanese perspectives, in order to understand consumers’ attitudes and the factors that influence their purchase intentions towards organic food. In Hong Kong, environmental factors and organic food knowledge were found to be important elements that affect consumers’ attitudes towards organic food, but health consciousness did not affect the beliefs of Hong Kong youth (Cheung et al., 2015). In Malaysia, youths’ knowledge of organic food was the main factor that affected their purchase intentions towards it (Thambiah et al., 2015).
In recent years, there have been a number of food safety incidents in Taiwan that caused the Department of Health and Welfare to revise the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation seven times in six years, from 2010 to 2015. The agricultural department’s food tracking systems, establishment of production records, and certification process of organic food became more stringent. Consumers are now able to clearly see a product’s ingredients, origin, producer, manufacturing date, expiration date, and the company responsible for the product, as well as the entire process. All this information...