The Effect of Food Safety-Related Attributes on Customer Satisfaction of Ready-to-Eat Foods at Hypermarkets

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper by Wei is ill-conceived.  An attempt has been made to connect food safety with customer satisfaction, whereas, the two terms are not related, because food safety issues can be presented in even the most consumerally acceptable products. 

English language usage makes reading most of the paper very difficult, and incoherent. A good English revision is highly recommended.

The survey conducted was very preliminary, and with no training of the respondents in the area, the results were quite expected.

The statistical analysis is also very preliminary, with no cluster analysis present, which would be expected to the least, in such a study.

Some questions of the study also don't make sense, and high scores are affected probably by the fact that the worker staff knew that this survey was being conducted - thus ensuring a proper and good sdata, with all means between 3.9-4.4!! Serious questions on the efficacy of surveying exist with this study.

Moreover, the topic of the study is not related to Sustainability in any way!!

 

Author Response

Thanks for your suggestion to make this paper better. 

The 1st revised article is under English editing by MDPI system and will be completed on 7 September, 2021, I will send English edited version as soon as possible. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting and practice-oriented paper about the effect of food safety-related attributes on the customer satisfaction of ready-to-eat foods at hypermarkets, but some aspects of the manuscript need to be improved.

I would change the title to ‘The effect of food safety-related attributes on the customer satisfaction of ready-to-eat foods at hypermarkets’ to better describe what the research paper is really about.

In the abstract I would mention the used statistical analyses, would emphasize more the major results of the study and I think its last sentence is unnecessary.

I think both the Introduction and the Literature review should be shortened, be made more concise, because you can find some overlappings, repetitions, and the structure of the manuscript is little bit unbalanced in this form, these chapters are too long compared to the ‘Method’, ‘Results and Discussion’ and Conclusions and Recommendations’ chapters. I deem, especially subchapters 2.1 and 2.2 can be significantly curtailed, merged, because their many aspects are loosely related to the topic of the manuscript. In the first two sentences of the last paragraph in Chapter 2.2 it is not completely clear for me what the Author would like to say.

I guess the noun ‘clue’ is very rarely used in this regard.

Please add to the Method (Chapter 3.1.), when (months, year) were the data collected.

In Chapter 3.2. the same Likert-scale was used in the first 2 parts of the questionnaire, that is why, the scale should not be written twice in the same paragraph.

The used questionnaire as supplementary material would greatly support the study results and help the readers better understand the applied method and the results.

I would use ‘Results and Discussion” title and I am missing the subchapters within Chapter 4.

I could not find where Table 1 is cited in the text.

Considering the socio-demographic profile of the respondents (Table 1) please explain why the education level was so high amongst the employees of this hypermarket.

It would also require some explanation that if 43.8% of the respondents’ familiarity with HACCP was low, I think, practically, they had no knowledge about what HACCP meant, how just 3% of them had a low attitude to HACCP. 97% of them gave medium and high attitude to HACCP answers, probably because they felt them as expectations. In the second paragraph of Chapter 4 you stated that the respondents generally think HACCP certification is good (?), while only 3% of the respondents think HACCP certification is not good (?). This corresponds to the respondents’ attitude (low, medium, high) to HACCP in Table 1? It would require some clarification, explanation, and the relationship between the HACCP and the customer satisfaction should also be worth discussing a little bit more for the Readers.

In the third paragraph of Chapter 4 what does ‘recent years’ mean?

‘The impact of food safety-related quality on satisfaction at hypermarkets’ sentence would be a subchapter title?

Table 3. I would formally segment this table according to the 4 factors.

In the last paragraph of Chapter 4 these two consecutive sentences ‘Furthermore, these three factors are equally important to enhance customer satisfaction. However, the facilities factor is more important toward enhancing customer satisfaction in this study.’ are contradictory to each other. Please clarify them.

The Conclusions and Recommendations chapter is quite long, it should be based on own results, and its first paragraph is more like an Introduction/Literature review.

‘Public health measures are still needed to stop the spread of COVID-19, while hypermarkets need to be stringent about enforcing social distancing and other food safety measures as they open.’ - This sentence should be supported with own results in the Conclusions or be deleted.

‘This study uses a service model’ is mentioned twice within the Conclusions chapter.

‘heuristic indicators’ – what do you mean?

Author Response

Thanks for your commends to make this paper better.

The 1st revised article is under English editing by MDPI system and will be completed on 7 September, 2021, I will send English edited version as soon as possible. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript titled "The Effect of Food Safety on the Customer Satisfaction of Ready-to-eat Foods at Hypermarkets" concerns the perception of food safety issues at hypermarkets. Which is an important research area and contribute to food safety understanding and promotion.

However, the text is difficult to read and needs to be improved. Particularly the rationale and conclusions of the research.

Please, use the past tense to describe the experiment. The research was done in the past, so "the objective was ...", "The data used herein were collected" and so on.

I strongly recommend rewriting the sentences whit the aim. Simply write what was researched, without "Regarding..."

"There is also limited information about the effect of food safety-related settings on internal customers’ satisfaction." Is this was measured? How?

The questioner should be added to the article. Maybe there is the answer to the above question...

In my opinion, mentioning the Covid-19 is poorly justified in the manuscript. Especially, when the issue was not undertaken in the questioner. It is not only a matter of attracting consumers. I would see more explanation why discussed factors are important regarding Covid-19.

The sentence "Food industries can get two certifications, one for food safety and the other for quality assurance under the HACCP certificate scheme." should be clarified. Purely, the HACCP regard food safety but quality assurance is undertaken in the QACCP. Please, explain what kind of the HACCP certificate scheme you mean.

It would be beneficial to the reader to give a few examples to this sentence "Responding to the pandemic, the CDC [9] has recommended new process to protect customers’ welfare."

The sentences regarding employees (the introduction) should be placed in the methodology or the results. What is the justification for putting them in this part?

Citation 20 (page 3 and 9), 5 (page 4) 24 (page 9) in the text need attention and adaptation to the requirements of the journal.

In table 2, what does mean "s.d.", "A22" and others acronyms?

Table 1 and 4 is not cited in the text.

In the conclusion, there are repeated sentences from the introduction which gives an overall impression of saying nothing new.

Generally, the idea and research are valuable but poorly described.

 

 

Author Response

Thanks very much for your commends that encourage me to think more outside the box. Some suggestions are very detail that makes my paper better. The revised article is under English editing and will be completed on 7 September, 2021, I will send the version as soon as possible. Maybe you have a nice fall season.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Although the authors did response to reviewer comments, but failed to incorporate the suggestions. The sensory study is very questionable, and in-house participants seem biased, with no or little improvements suggested, and no resolution available to make any conclusions. Statistical analysis is still very poor. It does not seem that future revisions will be able to improve the manuscript.

Author Response

Thanks for reviewer’s recommendations.

 

• Food safety is a critical issue to all customers, and employees are generally considered as internal customers. In-house employees spend much more time in service facilities than customers as well as with more experience of RTE food safety systems. Thus, in-house participants for sensory study are not bias but with better insights. However, author appreciate reviewer’s concern. “Future studies should compare the perception of food safety-attributes between the internal and external customer” is added as “future suggestions”. Shown in page 13 paragraph 1 line 2-6.
• Although basic statistical analysis methods were used, these statistical results can achieve the research purpose of current research. The major technique for this study is Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) for uncovering the underlying structure of a relatively large set of variables. The Cronbach’s α coefficients ranged from 0.91 to 0.86, and the cumulative variance explained was 61.89%, and factor loading were higher than 0.4, showing that the food safety-related service scale can achieve adequate levels of internal consistency (shown in page 9 paragraph 1 line 11-14). Another technique for this study is Regression analysis which sufficiently identified the impact indicators. The adjusted R² was 0.642 higher than 0.5 (shown in page 10 paragraph 4 line 3-5). Thus, the statistical analysis of this study did deduce or infer meaning about the underlying dataset or the reality that it attempts to describe. However, author concur reviewer’s concern. Research suggestion is also added (page 10 paragraph 4 line 11-13).

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for addressing my comments. The author have made significant changes in the manuscript which, I guess, has improved a lot. I just have some minor comments.

In Chapter 3.3 the significance level is not given.

The last sentence in the second paragraph in Chapter 4 should be rephrasing to make it clearer for the Readers.

In Table 2 the Scale (1-5) should be given, even as a note under the table.

A linguistic revision of the text is still required before publication.

Author Response

1.Thank you for addressing my comments. The author have made significant changes in the manuscript which, I guess, has improved a lot. I just have some minor comments.

Response1: Thank you very much for your recommendations.

2. In Chapter 3.3 the significance level is not given.

Response 2: the significance level is given in Chapter 3.3 in the last sentence (Page 6). The sentence is “Decide whether there was a significant relationship between the variables in the linear egression model of the data set faithful at .05 significance level.”

 

3. The last sentence in the second paragraph in Chapter 4 should be rephrasing to make it clearer for the Readers.

Response 3: The last sentence in the second paragraph in Chapter 4 was moved and rephrased to Recommendations (Page 13 paragraph 1 line 2-6.)

 

4. In Table 2 the Scale (1-5) should be given, even as a note under the table.

Response 4: the scale (1-5) was given at the bottom of Table 2 (page 9).

5. A linguistic revision of the text is still required before publication.

Response 5: A linguistic revision was finished, the “English Editing Certificate” was attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The revised manuscript "The Effect of Food Safety-Related Attributes on the Customer Satisfaction of Ready-to-eat Foods at Hypermarkets " presents the data and analysis of the perception of the safety of ready-to-eat foods at hypermarkets.

The author introduces significant changes to the text that have improved the quality of the information provided. 

In the current version of the article, there is no information about the value of the significance level used in statistical inference. Please add to chapter 3.3 

Moreover, the text needs revision and change the tense present to past where appropriate. The calculation was made in the past...

 

Author Response

Reviewer 3

1. The revised manuscript "The Effect of Food Safety-Related Attributes on the Customer Satisfaction of Ready-to-eat Foods at Hypermarkets " presents the data and analysis of the perception of the safety of ready-to-eat foods at hypermarkets. The author introduces significant changes to the text that have improved the quality of the information provided.

Response1: Thank you very much for you recommendations.

2. In the current version of the article, there is no information about the value of the significance level used in statistical inference.Please add to chapter 3.3 

Response 2: the significance level is given in Chapter 3.3 in the last sentence (Page 6). The sentence is “Decide whether there was a significant relationship between the variables in the linear egression model of the data set faithful at .05 significance level.”

 

3. Moreover, the text needs revision and change the tense present to past where appropriate. The calculation was made in the past...

Response 3: A linguistic revision was finished, the “English Editing Certificate” was attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

mansucript can now be accepted, as I am satisfied with author rebuttal.