Modeling Consumers' Purchase Intentions for Coated Fruits to Reduce Food Waste

Shelf life-extending edible coatings for fruits offer a promising approach to mitigate wastage of fresh produce in households, yet their effectiveness ultimately depends on consumer acceptance. Grounded in the expectancy-value framework, the present study examines how trust in actors of the food sector, beliefs regarding benefits and risks, and attitudes influence purchase intentions for four coated example fruits: avocados, bananas, pears and tomatoes. We distinguished between cognitive and affective attitudes to capture both rational and emotional evaluations. An online survey was conducted with a total of 3,568 German consumers between December 2025 and January 2026, with independent subsamples for each example fruit. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was applied to estimate four fruit-specific models. While benefit beliefs, risk beliefs, attitudes and purchase intentions varied across fruit examples, the structural relationships between constructs remained consistent, suggesting a generalizability of model relationships to other product contexts. Across all fruit examples, higher levels of trust in actors of the food sector were associated with more favorable benefit beliefs, reduced risk beliefs, and more positive cognitive and affective attitudes, which ultimately increased purchase intentions. We further found a strong relationship between benefit beliefs and cognitive attitudes, as well as between risk beliefs and affective attitudes, highlighting the necessity of addressing both attitude dimensions in the context of shelf life-extending innovations. The results of our study can be leveraged to design effective communication strategies to support the uptake of food waste-reducing technologies, and to inform the design of future studies which should incorporate real purchasing scenarios.