A Methodological Review of the Impacts of Risk and Trust on Consumer Behaviour Towards Food Safety

Consumers’ attitudes to trust and risk are key issues in food safety research and attention needs to be focused on clearly defining a framework for analysing consumer behaviour in these terms. By creating a platform, or benchmark, it is hoped that more succinct policy programmes may be initiated to better communicate relevant issues to consumers. In order to achieve this, a detailed review of the recent literature surrounding risk, trust and, the relationship between the two must be conducted. This paper aims to collate the literature in the fields of consumer attitudes to trust and risk. It provides an insight into the economic and other modelling procedures available to measure consumers’ attitudes to risk and trust in food safety and specifically notes the need for future research to concentrate on examining risk and trust as highly related variables rather than two distinct concepts.