Consumer Food Satisfaction: Fulfilment of Expectations or Evaluation of Performance?

This paper investigates whether consumers when buying food products are likely to form expectation-performance comparisons or whether they are more likely to base their satisfaction assessment on performance evaluation. Three different experiments were conducted in order to investigate the problem setting. The food products used were shrimps (experiment A), cheese (experiment B) and potato-chips (experiment C). In contrast to the suggestions put forward in the literature on satisfaction research the results did not show disconfirmation to have any significant effect on satisfaction. The results also revealed that a higher task involvement increased respondents’ propensity to incorporate performance perceptions in their assessment of disconfirmation. However, a higher task involvement did not affect the relation between disconfirmation and satisfaction, which remained insignificant across involvement levels.