**2. Materials and Methods**

The study was carried out in the first half of 2017 in Poland on a population of 500 consumers. It was a pilot study in which 50% of the studied group of respondents were men and 50% were women. The integrity of the study sample was the only parameter of purposeful selection of the study subject matter. Other selection conditions of consumers participating in the study were randomized and comprised of:


Following a demographic analysis of the respondents taking part in the study, regarding their sex, age, education and income, some similarities and relationships were observed between the characteristics. An analysis of concentrations was performed in order to group the respondents

according to uniform or highly similar characteristics [35]. Grouping was intended to focus attention on the groups of consumers participating in the study, which could become representative groups from the point of view of the conclusions drawn from the study. A two-step concentration analysis was applied to divide the study participants into four groups. The Bayesian information criterion (BIC) was used to separate the subgroups, while the distance between the study participants was measured with a credibility logarithm. The two-step concentration analysis facilitated the identification of the following four groups; most homogeneous within a specific group and also most diversified as compared to other groups, based on such variables as sex, age, education, and income:


Table 1 presents the quantitative characteristics of the identified groups.


**Table 1.** Profiles of the four identified groups of respondents.

Source: data developed based on our own study.

A proprietary questionnaire consisting of eight main questions and six identification questions concerning sex, age, education, household size, and income of the respondents (based on the analysis of concentrations, household size and place of residence did not matter from the point of view of respondent grouping) was the study tool. Among the main questions there were six multiple-choice questions and two questions where one needed to assign rank on a 1–6 and 1–5 scale. "1" meant most important, and "5" or "6" least important. The ranked questions concerned those factors most important for consumers when they buy food. They involved such aspects as knowledge of the brands, guarantee of product quality and freshness, low price, best before date, product origin, and ingredients. Moreover, the questions touched upon information that in the consumers' opinions should be placed on food packaging (i.e., information about the producer, the product's energy value, best before date, detailed information about raw materials, and product ingredients).

Collection of empirical materials by means of an interview questionnaire developed by the authors was justified by the specificity of the research and the necessity to reach a wide range of respondents.

A focused group interview (i.e., a focus group), composed of representatives of academic staff and entrepreneurs was involved in the study in order to:


The study used both direct tools (proprietary interviews) and indirect tools (e-mails and Google surveys). The data from the study were collected in an Excel spreadsheet and then summarized and analyzed quantitatively using Statistica (a statistical data-processing software). The following statistical measures were used to analyze the results of the study:


The majority of analyses in the study were based on data in the form of ranks or ordinal variables. Therefore, referring to the characteristics of each statistical measure, when testing hypotheses mentioning different distributions of ranks in different groups, the Kruskal–Wallis test was used. Pearson's Chi-squared test was used for verification of the presence of relationships between the variables according to the hypotheses. The following symbols were used for presenting the study results:

