Enhancing ethnic food acceptance and reducing perceived risk: The effects of personality traits, cultural familiarity, and menu framing

This study examined whether innate food-related personality traits (food neophobia), as well as food external factors such as cultural familiarity and menu framing, influence U.S. customers’ reluctance to try ethnic foods. In order to achieve this aim, this study first investigated whether familiarity with cultural contents (e.g., music or movies) helps reduce the perceived risk of ethnic foods and, further, whether it increases acceptance of novel foods. Second, food related behaviors, willingness to try ethnic foods and perceived risk, were examined under various menu conditions with different visual and verbal information frames using a sample of U.S. consumers with varying levels of food neophobia. The results empirically suggest that increasing familiarity with Korean culture through exposure to Korean lifestyles, music, movies, and soap operas could alleviate food neophobia as a barrier to accepting novel ethnic foods. Moreover, the results of the scenario experiments indicate that the menu design format can serve as a tool not only to increase customers’ willingness to accept ethnic foods, but also to reduce the perceived risks of trying ethnic foods.