Food consumption of Middle Easterners in Sweden

This paper gives the reader an opportunity to explore new grounds regarding a relatively new field that has opened in Sweden. The result is based on an explorative research conducted by us, with starting point whether immigrants, consisting of Middle Eastern ones, can be seen as an attractive target group for big grocery shops. In order to understand whether they are attractive to target, we need to grasp underlying factors such as our research question: “What are the habits of Middle Eastern consumers regarding food that marketers from Sweden can target?” To do so we were forced to investigate what kind of lifestyle an immigrant from the Middle East has, since the immigrant’s lifestyle influences what sort of food he/she will consume. When investigating the lifestyle we were able to concentrate on certain areas that we saw had a clear relation in influencing immigrants’ food choices, such as religion, acculturation and so forth. Our method was built on six qualitative interviews with immigrants coming from Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. The selection of these countries was based on the similarity of food habits. Our theoretical section was constructed to help us answer our research question through determining certain parts in an immigrant’s life. We combined several theories revolving around the subject due to lack of research in our field. This resulted in an empirical analysis where we concluded that different parts in our interviewees’ lives affected their choice of food. In this sense we also were able to answer our research question regarding the food habits a Middle Eastern person has with respect to our interviewees’ answers. We were able to follow the purpose of our work to get an insight in an unexplored field