Parents’ preferences for a plant-based game for shifting to sustainable healthy diets

Some of the major issues of this century are environmental damage, availability of resources and health concerns, especially, obesity. Food production and the current model of food consumption contribute to make these issues bigger. From this perspective consumers can make the difference depending on their eating behavior and their consciousness to minimize food waste. One way to make children more aware of environment and induce them to eat healthier food in the future might be the introduction of educational games made by food waste through which they learn by playing the importance of the environment and the impact of their health of food they eat. In this study we investigated the parent’s behavior and how much they are willing to pay for a kind of food products with educational and eating scope.The study took place in Spain. The sample was set at 300 individuals randomly stratified by sex, age and province and the target sample were parents of children aged 4 to 12 and a hypothetical choice experiment was used to estimate parent´s preferences for different alternative of game food product. The results indicate that the behavior showed by these parents are in line with the European strategy “From farm to fork” where it is recommended moving to a more plant-based diet in order to reduce life-threatening diseases, and also environmental impact of the food system. In our investigation consumers are willing to pay more for the product with a storybook related to healthy eating habits or recyling better than no storybook.This research was funded by FP7-MC-CIG-332769, fighting against obesity in Europe: the role of health-related claims in food products (OBESCLAIM). The authors would like to thank to Iberfunghi start-up to provide us all the information about their novel mushroom-plant game product