What are the walloon consumer's main barriers and motivations with respect to the bulk buying of food products (excluding fresh fruit and vegetables) ?

Abstract

This thesis aims at identifying the Walloon consumers’ main motivations and barriers with respect to the bulk buying of food products, beyond the traditional fresh fruit and vegetables. The final purpose of this paper would be to obtain a qualitative understanding of the underlying reasons inciting individuals to adopt, or not, this purchasing behaviour. By means of a multidisciplinary literature review, ten interviews to experts and twenty in-depth interviews with consumers, this dissertation allows to envisage the principal factors advocating for or discouraging individuals to buy unpackaged food. It results a key variable that would encourage consumers to buy food in bulk: their psychological characteristics. These ones seem to constitute the source of their main motivations and barriers towards this practice. The hypotheses issued by this paper bring to the academic literature the initial foundations of a new research thematic. This dissertation also offers to managers a potential bulk buyers’ segmentation as well as some recommendations to exploit or remove their motivations and barriers pointed out throughout the present qualitative study.