Identifying objective quality attributes of functional foods

Abstract

This study aims to identify objective quality attributes of functional foods based on literature reviews and proposing the future research agenda. There are not many articles that examined the objective quality of functional foods. This article aims to fill that gap: discussing objective quality attribute of functional foods based on the syntheses of previous studies. Previous research on objective quality of functional foods mostly came from the field of food science, and therefore applicable only to certain foods. Studies from the field of consumer behaviour/management mostly focused on perceived quality. This study used journals from three databases and utilised the term ‘functional food’ as the main keyword. Articles gathered were filtered based on their types and contents. There are two categories of objective quality found in literature. Firstly, objective quality related to the process, and secondly, objective quality related to the product itself. Both types are required to make accurate and marketable health claims of functional foods. Future research should try to empirically validate those objective quality attributes.