Introduction: There have been a huge demand for organic food in Vietnam and it is predicted to become even bigger after COVID-19 pandemic. However, the market is facing uncertainty regarding products quality, certification and so on. Many studies have shown that Vietnamese consumers have high intention to purchase organic food but the actual purchase afterwards is still a controversy topic. The current research was carried out to investigate the factors affecting consumers’ intention to buy imported organic food in Vietnam and concurrently, examine whether their intention will lead to the actual buying or not.
Objectives: The thesis was based on my previous project about consumer’s buying intention of imported organic food in Vietnam in 2019 (Nguyen, 2019). In this thesis, based on consumers behavior related theories and through a systematic literature review, I used a different set of determinants afftecting consumers’ purchasing intention in my research model to examnine whether it provides a better predictation compared to the previous set in my prior project or not, and additionally, this thesis went further to the final step of consumers journey, which was from the intention to the actual purchase to see if there is any correlation between them. It also examined the differences among demographic groups on consumers actual purchase.
Methods: I used the same structure as my previous work to develop this thesis because they bo. Under positivism paradigm, 237 valid responses were collected via questionaire and using convenience sampling method. Acquired data was then analyzed by SPSS software.
Results: Results showed that Perceived health had the biggest positive influence on consumers buying intention, followed by trust on imported organic products. Consumers buying intention also had positive affect on their actual buying behaviors afterwards. As to demographic profiles, people with high educational level and monthly income from 10 million VND are more likely to purchase imported organic food in Vietnam.
Conclusion: The findings indicated that perception about health and trust on the products should be improved. A number of recommendations were proposed based on the research results to help international companies as well as all sellers and distributor selling imported organic food successfully win the market.