254 INTEGRATED QUALITY MANAGEMENT
for an alternative in frozen vegetables, canned vegetables or vegetables
in glass. Focusing on vegetables in glass, three functions can be identi-
fied:
- Ideal vegetable for fast and cold preparations such as celery and grated
carrots - Useful in the case of unexpected situations such as coming home late
and unexpected visitors - Alternative for fresh vegetables, of which the preparation is time-
consuming, such as salsifies, asparagus, red cabbage, carrots and peas
An interesting topic resulting from the analysis of the purchase cri-
teria for vegetables in glass concerns the fact that heavy users (several
times per week) did not consider themselves as such. This attitude is re-
lated to a preference for the fresh vegetable and that housewives who
only prepare and serve vegetables in glass fear being considered as less
caring about their family and even as being lazy.
The attitude of the respondents toward vegetables in general was eval-
uated by means of a 3-point Likert (ordinal) scale that required the re-
spondents to indicate a degree of agreement or disagreement with a series
of statements derived from the qualitative research part. The profile
analysis of the responses for the total sample is presented in Table 13.1.
Statistically significant differences in attitude between the four de-
fined types of vegetable consumers were revealed by performing the
Kruskal-Wallis nonmetric one-way analysis of variance. This test ex-
amines the difference in medians with the null hypothesis being that the
medians of the four populations are equal. The significance of the com-
puted chi-square statistic implies the rejection of the null hypothesis
(Malhotra, 1996). The null hypothesis can be rejected for statement 1
(p0.020), 3 (p0.029), 4 (p0.000), 5 (p0.010), 6 (p0.014)
and 9 (p0.038).
Consumers of fresh and frozen vegetables, when compared to con-
sumers of vegetables in glass, agreed more with the statement that a
meal is not complete without vegetables and with the statement that veg-
etables are the most important part of the daily meal. Consumers of fresh
vegetables disagreed more than consumers of vegetables in glass that
preparation is too time-consuming. The typical consumer of fresh veg-
etables also expressed both higher preference for vegetables produced
within his/her country or region and a higher willingness to pay a pre-
mium price for environment-friendly produced vegetables. Consumers