Consumers’ Attitudes to Cheese in Indonesia: an Exploratory Study

Abstract

This study aims to understand the reasons behind low level of cheese consumption in Indonesia through behavior in chese consumption and expectation of cheese important attributes in asociation to consumers’ attitudes. The research objectives will evaluate consumers’ behavior in cheese consumption, recognizing cheese important attributes, classifying consumers’ attitudes toward cheese, identifying the association between cheese consumption behavior with consumers’ attitudes, and spotting the different in distribution of the importance of cheese attributes to consumers’ attitudes. Survey was conducted using google form and distribute via social medias and chatting applications. Participants were adult with age 18 years old and above who lived in Indonesia. Microsoft Excel 2016 and SPSS version 24 are used as computer-assisted for frequency and distribution analysis along with Pearson’s chi-square test and Kruskal-Wallis test. As the result, majority of Indonesian consumed cheese, once a week, more interest to lower price cheese, and mostly in form of cheesy foods such as pizza, and cheese bread. The order of most important cheese attributes were life-shelf, taste, production process, maturation, packaging, source of milk used, nutritional value, origin, and price. Consumers’ attitudes toward cheese for indonesia consumers found that the most agreed cheese attitudes was taste, followed by safe for consumption, availability, high nutritional value, healthy offering, authenticity then affordability. The association test indicated a strong evidence that cheese consumption, place, frequency, and expense were associated to consumers’ attitudes, while type or form of cheese consumed were not associated. Distribution results showed that there were statistically different distribution between the importance of taste, maturation, packaging, and nutritional value attributes across categories of consumers’ attitudes, while the importance of life-shelf, production process, source of milk, origin, and price attributes have the same distribution across the categories of consumers’ attitudes.