Research On Consumers’ Cognition Of The Application Of Blockchain In Food Safety Management And Its Impact On Purchase Intention

Food safety is a worldwide problem.Food safety incidents not only endanger personal safety,but also weaken the general trust of human society and hinder economic development.With the progress of economy,science and technology and the development of society,some new technological methods such as big data,Internet of things and blockchain have been developed and applied.Blockchain is considered to be one of the promising technologies in the field of food safety.Its decentralized,safe and transparent features and core technologies such as distributed ledgers and smart contracts can bring technical advantages to the realization of food safety traceability,which is bound to improve the level of supply chain management and reduce management costs.In the development and application of blockchain technology,enterprises have invested in food traceability applications based on blockchain.In addition,the state has also begun to implement relevant policy opinions.Therefore,it is crucial to promote the application of blockchain technology in food safety management.From this point of view,this paper first explores consumers’ cognition of the application of blockchain in food safety management,that is,some advantages and resistance of the application of blockchain in food safety management.The real implementation needs the acceptance and purchase of consumers,and consumers’ cognition will influence consumers’ purchase to a certain extent.Therefore,in combination with the previous consumer cognition,the impact of consumers’ cognition of the application of blockchain technology on food purchase intention was studied later.Firstly,based on the information adoption model,this paper takes the text data related to blockchain and food safety on the Zhihu platform as the research object,and summarizes and puts forward the viewpoints of argument on the application of blockchain in food safety management.Then,Tobit regression is used to conduct a quantitative analysis on the influencing factors of the acceptance and adoption of relevant text content on Zhihu platform by taking the viewpoints as independent variable and the number of likes as dependent variable,so as to analyze the advantages and obstacles of the application of blockchain widely recognized by consumers in food safety management.The empirical research results show that two viewpoints of Advantages of Blockchain Technology and High Costs have significant promotion effects on the public’s recognition and adoption,indicating that consumers generally agrees on the existence of these two advantages and obstacles in the application of blockchain in food safety management.Secondly,for consumers,whether consumers are willing to buy food products using blockchain technology and the influencing factors of their purchase intention have yet to be studied.Based on the stimulus-organism-response theory and referring to the conclusions obtained from the previous study on consumer cognition,this paper establishes two theoretical models about consumers’ purchase intention,and analyzes the influence of food safety incidents and application of blockchain technology on consumers’ food purchase intention through six experiments,and further explores the internal influence mechanism.the experimental results show that the more serious the food safety incidents,the less consumers will buy general food related to these food safety incidents.Moreover,risk perception has a partial mediating effect in the main effect of food safety incidents on general food purchase intention.Compared with general food without blockchain technology,the adoption of blockchain technology reduces consumers’ purchase intention.In the relationship between the application of blockchain technology and consumers’ purchase intention,advantage perception has a partial mediating effect,and price has a significant moderating effect.In the case that the price of food using blockchain technology is considerably higher than that of general food,the negative impact of food using blockchain technology on its purchase is strengthened.The research in this paper has important reference significance for food safety and blockchain-related research,and the research conclusion has important reference value and enlightenment for blockchain enterprises,food enterprises,consumers,governments and regulatory authorities.