Using social media to analyze consumers' attitude toward natural food products

PurposeThis paper examines user generated social media content bearing on consumers' attitude and belief systems taking the domain of natural food product as illustrative case. This research sheds light on how consumers think and talk about natural food within the context of food well-being and health.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used a keyword-based approach to extract user generated content from Twitter and used both food as well-being and food as health frameworks for analysis of more than two million tweets.FindingsThe authors found that consumers mostly discuss food marketing and less frequently discuss food policy. Their results show that tweets regarding naturalness were significantly less frequent in food categories that feature naturalness to an extent, e.g. fruits and vegetables, compared to food categories dominated by technologies, processing and man-made innovation, such as proteins, seasonings and snacks.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper provides numerous implications and contributions to the literature on consumer behavior, marketing and public policy in the domain of natural food.Practical implicationsThe authors' exploratory findings can be used to guide food system stakeholders, farmers and food processors to obtain insights into consumers' mindset on food products, novel concepts, systems and diets through social media analytics.Originality/valueThe authors' results contribute to the literature on the use of social media in food marketing on understanding consumers' attitudes and beliefs toward natural food, food as the well-being literature and food as the health literature, by examining the way consumers think about natural (versus man-made) food using user generated content of Twitter, which has not been previously used.