Innovációs lehetőségek a konzerviparban – kulcsszerepben az egészség

Abstract

The Hungarian canned food industry has had to fight with a lot of problems lately to save both the inland and export-markets. One after the other the small preserving companies dropped out they were not able to compete with the members of inland- and world-markets in efficiency. The scourge of canned food industry has not finished yet, because expectedly we will get new import-waves from the Central-European countries applying to the European Union together with Hungary, and these will make it more difficult to keep the market positions of inland companies. In this situation is becoming more important for the Hungarian canned food industry to give attention to product innovation and to suffice all the consumers’ needs. In our research the consumers’ expectations, preferences and the attitudes toward canned foods have been measured in order to offer consumer-central reform possibilities for the Hungarian canned food industry. Our results show that the main reason for not purchasing canned foods is that consumers presume these products’ damaging effects for health, and they prefer fresh, frozen and own preserved products. The health conscious consumers are not satisfied with the lower nutrition content of these products. We offer as a possibility of product innovation to develop products with specifically beneficial effect on health. The health conscious consumers accept products fortified with vitamins, dietary fibers and mineral stuffs, but they judge the methods which save the original nutrition content better. These give the possibility to use „minimal processing” technologies. Secondly, we advise to emphasize the healthiness of the already existing products and in order to realize this it is for necessary for the companies together and to use collective marketing, because a good consumers’ judgement of canned food products is in the interest of the whole industry. Our third suggestion is to emphasize the Hungarian origin. Our results show that the consumers prefer the products made in Hungary. At the same time they think wrongly about several Hungarian product brands that they are import products. This result is very important because it lets us know that they never check on the product where it was made. Our results show that the canned food industry has chances to keep to the present positions and to reach new consumers.