Ninth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Meal replacement food, which is made based on modern culinary science, becomes a good choice not only for people who want to lose weight but also convenient for modern busy people. This paper aims to explore the structural relationships among perceived behavior control, subjective norms, perceived usefulness, expectation confirmation, satisfaction, continuance intention and recommendation intention, in order to further analyze consumers’ willingness to use and post-use behaviors of meal replacement foods. A total of 234 valid questionnaires were collected from female customers who have eaten meal replacement foods in Taipei City, Taiwan, and the partial least squares (PLS) method was utilized to measure and test the research hypotheses. This study suggests, firstly, it was observed that the consumers’ perceived behavior control and expectation confirmation to be critical in shaping their perceived usefulness of meal replacement foods although expectation confirmation was found to be a stronger predictor than perceived behavior control. Secondly, meal replacement food industry should be convenient in packaging and eating, so that consumers will not waste time and do not feel trouble in eating. Thirdly, the results also can be found that the perceived usefulness and satisfaction to be critical in shaping their continuance intention of meal replacement foods although satisfaction was found to be a stronger predictor than perceived usefulness. Last, it can be seen that the higher satisfaction, the higher the recommendation intention of meal replacement foods.