Relationship Between Consumers’ Circumstances and Food Consumption Behavior

In recent years, food consumption in Japan has changed significantly due to a variety of factors such as imports from over-seas, a declining and aging population, a rapid increase in dual-earner households, and diversification of lifestyles and so on. Although many studies have been conducted on consumer purchasing behavior and food consumption behavior, there is still room for debate on the relationship between specific consumer behaviors and their backgrounds. In this study, we aim to clarify the relationship between consumers’ circumstances and their food consumption behavior by using text data of dining table and cooking diary. Specifically, to categorize consumers’ eating behavior by situation, we constructed a topic model using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation method and performed non-hierarchical clustering. We analyzed the words that appeared in each typified cluster for frequency to extract and interpret the characteristic words. Furthermore, we clarified the relationship between consumers’ emotions and their food consumption behavior by conducting an emotional analysis using the BERT model.