Moderating effect of self-efficacy on the relationship between consumer attitude and willingness to consume healthy food

The demand for healthy food consumption, such as functional food, has increased due to the prevalence of certain diseases that relate to unhealthy eating. Functional food is a new category of product that is fortified with nutrition and has been proven scientifically to prevent the risks of certain diseases and improve overall health. Healthy life will affect positively on household income, productivity and national economic prosperity because it may enable an individual to increase quality of life. Therefore, functional food consumption reflected the concept of sustainable diets that will contribute to the enhancement of sustainable livelihood, good health and well-being, as well as the economic and environment sustainability as a whole. Despite gaining acceptance amongconsumers, the information regarding the process of consumer behaviour, the influencing factors, and consequences are presently insufficient. Thus, there is a need to investigate the antecedent factors that influence the consumer willingness to consume healthy food in order to prevent diseases, increasegood health and well-being as well as reducing medical costs. Attitude plays a role as guidance on how information regarding functional food is noticed, adopted, accepted or rejected. With this in view, attitude was found to be one of the key factors that influence the behavioural of individuals towards healthy food choice. This study aimed to investigate the attitude dimensions that can predict consumer willingness to consume functional food and to examine the effect of self-efficacy as the moderator on the relationship between attitude dimensions and consumer willingness to consume such food. Four dimensions of functional food-related attitudes were examined in this study, which are; a reward from using functional food, a necessity for functional food, a safety of functional food, and a confidence in functional food. A mall-intercept survey was conducted with the sample of 452 respondents by using the self-administered questionnaire. The results revealed that only reward and necessity significantly influence consumer willingness to consume functional food. However, confidence and safety have no significant influence on consumer willingness to consume functional food. The moderator of self-efficacy was statistically significant and moderates the relationshipbetween attitude dimensions and consumer willingness to consume functional food. The results from this study would be valuable for the marketers in the healthy food industry to formulate effective marketing communication strategies in order to facilitate favourable attitudinal change towards good health and sustainable livelihood.