The influence of health and environment-focused values on restaurateur satisfaction in organic restaurants: a descriptive analysis in Spain

Abstract

As a consequence of the increasing importance of the organic food in several countries, there are many theoretical and empirical studies focused on analyzing whether the health values or rather the environmental attitudes of the restaurateurs, are the most influential factors on their satisfaction. However, it is very important to differentiate the impact of these factors in order to improve the restaurateur satisfaction in the marketing of organic labeled foods. As most studies in restaurants are related to customer satisfaction, this paper deals with a novel topic relating promotion and differentiation in organic restaurants and particularly describing restaurateur satisfaction (i.e. manager satisfaction). In the framework of a research project focused in organic restaurants, in this paper we investigate how restaurant managements’ attitudes influence decisions to promote organic foods as inputs on menus. Different combinations of promotional attributes of an organic menu are considered and a wide spatial representation of cross-sectional nature has been obtained, and an investigation of chefs’ decision-making criteria based on a questionnaire was carried out to collect data. We illustrate how is possible to manage the promotion of the organic restaurants in Spain and the implications of these findings for restaurants are discussed. The main contribution of this work is that there is a potential niche for restaurants in the marketing of organic labeled foods, in order to facilitate the promotion of organic food consumption in restaurants highlighting the attributes on which to establish the proposition of value.