Factors influencing healthy meal choice in Germany

The aim of this study is to discover what German restaurant customers consider to be healthy. Owing to the paucity of literature on healthy meals, this research attempts to initiate an exploratory investigation testing a new psychological construct of health meals by using college students as the study population. The proposed scale consists of three dimensions (nutrition value, organic content, and gastronomy), which are defined by 16 attributes. This study finds that low in fat is the major consideration for selecting healthy meals, whereas the aroma of meals is not a concern for healthy meal choice. In the final analysis 15 indicators are retained in the measurement scale after the reliability test. Since the dimension of organic content has the highest reliability score, it could be best utilized as the surrogate indicator assessing the perception of a healthy meal. The derived scale is rather embryonic since it is tested only on German students. It is suggested that the scale should be further tested by drawing large samples from heterogeneous populations to boost the scale's construct validity so as to collect samples from restaurant goers with different cultural background.