Food Reputation Map (FRM): International validation in Italy, USA and China.

Introduction. Food can be conceived as a social agent, being affected by and affecting the social world: just like any other social agent (individuals, organizations, places, etc.), food items hold their reputation from a range of stakeholders’ perspectives. Once a food item acquires its reputation in the eye of a stakeholder, the reputation affects the stakeholder’s food choices (e.g., purchase, consumption, etc.). The present contribution further develops an existing tool to measure any food item’s reputation (Food Reputation Map, FRM; Bonaiuto et al., 2017). Here a FRM standard version is validated in Italian, American English, and Chinese, by considering different samples in Italy, USA and China respectively. Method. Three FRM linguistic versions are generated by translating and back-translating the first Italian version into American English first, then translating and back-translating the last one into Chinese. The same structure characterizes the three linguistic versions: 92 items measure food reputation, covering 23 food reputation specific indicators, clustering into 6 food reputation synthetic indicators. CFAs are conducted in each of the three cultural contexts across the same three food items (citrus fruits, peeled tomatoes, vegetables) in each context: Italy (N = 1337), USA (N = 303) and China (N = 307). Results. Structural Equation Models show that the adopted pool of items has a comparable structure across the three cultures (with a few items differing from one language to the other), given the general good fit of data with the expected models (RMSEArange =.05-.08; SRMRrange =.04-.08; CFIrange =.91-.99). Conclusions. The resultant sets of items can be considered a first version measuring standard aspects of the complete reputation profile of any food item: They provide a benchmark system for comparing stakeholders’ attitudes and behaviours regarding food items across different cultural and linguistic contexts worldwide.