Sustainable food consumption in the nexus between national context and private lifestyle: A multi-level study

• 5 food-related lifestyle segments identified in 10 European countries.
• The 10 countries cluster in 3 regions with similar food-related lifestyle pattern.
• Lifestyle segments have significantly different food consumption patterns.
• Country classes have significantly different food consumption patterns.
• The impact of lifestyle on behaviour to some extend depends on country class.

This paper investigates how country of residence and food-related lifestyle (FRL) interact in shaping (un)sustainable food consumption patterns. An online survey was carried out in ten European countries (n ≈ 335 in each country), covering the five regions North, South, East, West and Central Europe. Multi-group CFA (AMOS22) was used to test the cross-national validity of the FRL instrument. After deleting a few items, it was found that the factorial structure of all five FRL domains is invariant with respect to factor configuration and factor loadings but not with respect to item intercepts. The segmentation analysis was performed by means of Latent Gold 5.1 and multi-level latent class analysis based on data from all ten countries and using the 23 FRL dimensions as input. A five-segment, three-country class solution was judged to produce the best compromise between fit and parsimony, confirming that cross-country FRL segments can be meaningfully identified, but that the segment structure differs across Europe’s regions. The joint effect of country class and FRL on sustainable food-related consumer behaviour was analysed by means of GLM (SPSS22). Both country class and FRL significantly account for variation in meat and organic food consumption and FRL in addition for variation in sustainable food product innovativeness. Further, there is significant interaction between country and FRL for all outcome variables. Hence, the impact of FRL on sustainability choices partly depends on country of residence.