Impact of Personal and Contextual Factors on Food Decision-Making

The understanding of the key factors underlying the decision-making processes behind the eating behavior is a great challenge for food marketing. Government organizations as well as an increasing number of food companies are interested in motivating healthy dietary habits. However, it turns out to be a complicated task due to the high number of internal and external factors involved that must be taken into account when considering a marketing strategy. This work tries to discover if it is possible to reveal new personal (internal) and contextual (external) variables in order to explain and predict both the nutritional value and category of the foods chosen by a given individual. The results suggest that variables such as personality, satisfaction, or productivity may help to predict the nutritional characteristics of food choices.