What Really Drives Sustainable Food Choices? New Study Weighs Awareness, Health, Money and Policy

Why do some shoppers fill their carts with sustainably produced food while others walk past the eco-labeled shelf without a second glance? A new study published in Discover Sustainability offers one of the more systematic attempts to answer that question, testing four candidate drivers of sustainable food consumption behavior side by side: environmental awareness, health consciousness, economic factors and policy interventions. The research, led by Jairaj J. Sasane of Dnyaan Prasad Global University in Pune, India, together with colleagues from five other Pune-area institutions, set out to determine not only whether each factor matters on its own, but whether the four combined can explain consumer behavior better than any single factor alone.

The question is far from academic. Food systems account for a substantial share of global greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, freshwater use and biodiversity loss, and shifting consumer demand toward sustainable options is widely viewed as a critical lever for change. Yet decades of research have produced a frustrating pattern: people who say they care about the environment do not always buy accordingly, a gap psychologists call the attitude-behavior gap. Understanding which forces actually move purchasing decisions, and how they interact, could help governments, retailers and public health campaigns design interventions that work in the real world rather than in survey questionnaires.

To probe those forces, the team conducted a cross-sectional survey of 300 adult consumers, each of whom bore responsibility for food purchasing in their household. Participants completed a structured, self-administered questionnaire designed to measure their sustainable food shopping behavior alongside the four hypothesized determinants. The researchers then turned to IBM SPSS Statistics for the analytical heavy lifting, running reliability tests to confirm the questionnaire’s internal consistency, descriptive statistics to characterize the sample, correlation analyses to examine pairwise relationships, and multiple regression to model the combined influence of all four factors simultaneously.

The results were clear on the central hypothesis. All four factors, environmental awareness, health consciousness, economic considerations and policy interventions, showed positive and statistically significant relationships with sustainable food shopping behavior. In other words, consumers who were more environmentally aware bought more sustainably, as did those who were more health conscious, those who found sustainable options affordable and accessible, and those who perceived supportive policy environments. No factor was a dud; each contributed something measurable to the picture of who shops sustainably and who does not.

More interesting, however, was what happened when the four were modeled together. The combined regression model accounted for a significantly greater proportion of the variance in sustainable food behavior than any individual factor could explain on its own. That finding carries a conceptual punch: the determinants of green food purchasing are not competing explanations to be ranked against one another, but complementary forces that operate in parallel. A shopper’s environmental values, personal health motivations, financial constraints and the policy landscape around them jointly shape what ends up in the shopping cart, and studying any one of them in isolation understates the complexity of the decision.

Within that combined model, environmental awareness emerged with the highest standardized weight, making it the strongest contributor when all four factors were considered simultaneously. Yet in a nuance the authors are careful not to paper over, the single strongest standalone model was health consciousness. That apparent tension is actually informative. Environmental awareness may be the most powerful lever in a multivariate context, where its effects can be distinguished from overlapping motivations, but health consciousness alone tracks sustainable purchasing remarkably well, perhaps because the personal, immediate benefits of healthy food are easier for consumers to act on than the diffuse, long-term benefits of environmental protection.

The practical implications flow directly from those patterns. The authors suggest that interventions emphasizing affordability and accessibility could be potent levers, reflecting the significant role of economic factors in their model. If sustainable food remains a premium product affordable only to a niche, awareness campaigns will keep bumping into a price barrier. They also point to credible communication about sustainability, and to co-branding strategies that pair sustainability with health messaging, an approach that the dominance of health consciousness in standalone models makes especially attractive. A label that tells a shopper a product is both good for them and good for the planet may recruit two motivations at once.

The study is equally candid about its limitations, and the authors devote detailed space to them. The cross-sectional, self-reported, single-source design means causal inferences are off the table: the data show associations at one point in time, not proof that environmental awareness causes sustainable purchasing rather than the reverse, or that some unmeasured factor drives both. Common method bias, the possibility that measuring predictors and outcomes through the same self-report instrument inflates their correlations, was not formally evaluated. The constructs of underlying behavioral theories, such as the theory of planned behavior or values-beliefs-norms frameworks, were not measured directly, and the measurement model has yet to be validated with confirmatory factor analysis. These are the kinds of caveats that separate a promising first result from a settled one, and the authors present them explicitly so readers can weigh the findings accordingly.

What the study does offer, and what the authors flag as its original contribution, is the empirical integration of four research streams that have largely run in parallel. Environmental psychology has long studied awareness and attitudes; public health research has examined health motivation in food choice; economics has addressed price and access; and policy studies have explored regulatory nudges. By combining all four in a single model and reporting the full analytical detail needed for replication and critical evaluation, the team provides a template other researchers can build on, refine and, ultimately, test with stronger designs, including longitudinal and experimental approaches that can establish causality.

For now, the takeaway for anyone trying to shift food consumption toward sustainability is that no single message will do the job. The Pune survey suggests that the most effective strategies will be multi-pronged: make sustainable food affordable and easy to find, communicate its benefits credibly, and frame it in terms of personal health as well as planetary stewardship, all within a policy environment that reinforces rather than undermines those choices. Confirming that recipe will require the more stringently designed studies the authors themselves call for, but as a map of the terrain, the study marks out four coordinates that any serious effort to change how we eat will need to navigate.

Subject of Research: Determinants of sustainable food consumption behavior among household food purchasers

Article Title: Determinants of sustainable food consumption behavior through environmental awareness, health consciousness, economic factors and policy interventions

Article References: Sasane, J. J., Burande, A. L., Waghmare, G., Bhalerao, H., Padhye, P., Kate, N., & Gaikwad, V. B. (2026). Determinants of sustainable food consumption behavior through environmental awareness, health consciousness, economic factors and policy interventions. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04952-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04952-6

Keywords: sustainable food consumption, consumer behavior, environmental awareness, health consciousness, economic factors, policy interventions, food choice, cross-sectional survey, multiple regression, Discover Sustainability, attitude-behavior gap, sustainability