Consumer acceptance of new food ingredients made from by‐products ‐ A focus group approach

With a constantly growing world population, the need for healthy and nutritional food is rising as well, which poses a challenge to both agricultural systems and food producers.Consequently, new innovative ways to secure the world's food supply need to be developed.One approach is to recycle the food industries by-products, like whey from the dairy industry, oilseed press cakes or brewers spent grains.By-products are generated at all phases of the value chain, i.e. from production to distribution, and are generally unavoidable during production.They can serve as raw material sources for different nutritional components, like dietary fiber, proteins, polyphenols, antioxidants and other bioactive compounds, depending on the by-product type.Their addition to food products may contribute to consumers' health and well-being through the increase of essential nutrients and bio-active compounds in the diet.However, when it comes to products with new ingredients that were probably also created using new and innovative green processing technologies, consumer perception and consumer acceptance are one of the most important aspects that need to be considered for a successful market implementation.Therefore, we conducted a focus group case study in four European countries, namely Germany, Italy, Romania, and Norway to get a better insight into the perception, acceptance and willingness to pay for newly developed products from by-product sources, as well as to analyze purchasing and consumption trends, and decisionmaking processes during the purchase.In each country, two focus groups involving 6 participants per group were formed, consisting of one group representing the 'general population' and one group forming the 'elderly population'.Participants were asked several questions on by-products to explore their general knowledge on food byproducts as well as on already existing food products with by-product ingredients.In order to evaluate the decision-making process, all participants received an explanation and introduction to the idea of enriching products using by-products from different food production chains (i.e.dairy, oilseeds, breweries, meat and prickly pear cactus) at some point during the study.