Consumer Awareness and Acceptability towards Sugarcane Bagasse Sustainable Food Packaging

Abstract

Packaging is one of the most important aspect of a product due to its benefits like protection of a product during its transport, delivering information, convenience and promotion, especially in food packaging in which maintaining food safety and shelf life is crucial. As there has been a growing environmental concern worldwide regarding the harmful impacts of packaging towards the environment, implementation of sustainable packaging is one of the sustainability practices to be adopt in mitigating these effects. Sugarcane bagasse is an excess byproduct of extracting sugarcane juice. It has many applications such as biomass for the production of second generation biofuels, electricity, enzymes and others. Its cellulose content also makes it a good alternative sustainable material for food packaging as it offers useful properties, one of them being higher mechanical strength. This study investigates how the characteristics of the packaging affect consumer acceptability of sustainable food packaging that is made up of sugarcane bagasse as well as investigating the awareness and purchase intention of sugarcane bagasse sustainable food packaging. The respondents generally prefer sugarcane bagasse packaging as compared to paper and Styrofoam packaging for all the attributes tested in this study, namely appearance, design, feel, overall liking, strength and naturalness. The awareness of sugarcane bagasse sustainable food packaging is still very low so further education on this is required. However, purchase intention of sugarcane bagasse packaging is the highest compared to the paper and Styrofoam packaging and the respondents are mostly inclined to purchase the sugarcane bagasse sustainable food packaging to lessen harmful environmental effects.