Sarah Price

Sarah is a PhD student in the Faculty of Management at Bournemouth University. The focus of her PhD is on Trust in Public Sector Foodservice. Her background of being a Nutritionist with both experience in Public Health and Hospitality has developed my interest in research in the catering industry.

She is German but have lived in the UK to undertake my university studies, which means she is fluent in both German and English.

Therefore it is possible for her to collect data in the UK and Germany where the research looks at eating out and aims to evaluate the type of information that consumers value when selecting food particularly in a worksite canteen. Past food scares have created a great interest in information about food and so this is a hot topic of interest. Although some research studies have focused on the importance of adequate nutrition information to consumers, the focus of these studies has been the retail sector and knowledge about consumer information needs in public sector foodservice is lacking. Furthermore, consumer interests go beyond the search for nutritional information with curiosity for information on other quality attributes and origin of food.

The first stage of her research has identified 13 different criteria which act as meta-preferences for similarities but also country specific subcategories which could be used by caterers to emphasize certain aspects of their menu. The aim of the study is to get a closer insight into the importance of these meta –preferences in each country and in different segments of the sample population using MaxDiff.

The key outputs of this research will be:

• To identify key factors that influence food choice when eating in a worksite canteen through the use of qualitative research methods in Germany and the UK.
• To empirically evaluate key factors influencing food choices made at work through the use of quantitative research methods in Germany and the UK.
• To assess industry stakeholders’ views on criteria of importance and consumer needs including ways of increasing trust in public sector foodservice.
• To explore a relationship between consumers' trust in eating in their worksite canteen, and the value that they put on key criteria.