Strategies for Developing Healthy Food Business for Sustainable Growth

10.2478/bjlp-2022-002067

Abstract

The healthy food trend has gained attention among consumers. This is in line with the government's strategy to increase the potential of the food processing industry to serve the current changes. However, at present, the number of businesses in the health food industry that have ceased operating has increased, which has caused the loss of the country's economic value. The purpose of this study was to investigate strategies for developing healthy food industry business for sustainable growth. This study uses mixed-methods research: the qualitative research was conducted through in-depth interviews with nine experts in order to create the research instrument used in the quantitative research, and a focus group discussion of 11 experts was conducted to find consensus on the model. A questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data from 500 entrepreneurs. Descriptive, referential, and multivariate statistics were used to analyze the data.

According to the research findings, the strategies for developing healthy food businesses for sustainable growth consisted of four components, which were prioritized based on their arithmetic means as follows: 1) Value Creation ( =4.34), 2) Marketing Competency ( =4.31),3) Environmental Assessment ( = 4.31), and 4) Stakeholder Engagement ( =4.30), respectively.

The analysis of the developed structural equation model revealed that it passed the assessment criteria and was consistent with the empirical data. The calculated values of probability of chi-square, the relative chi-square, the index of consistency, and the root mean squared error of approximation were 0.080, 1.118, 0.952, and 0.015, respectively.