Purchasing pattern of exotic vegetables by consumers

Abstract

Exotic vegetables locally called as English vegetables are now becoming integral part of consumers’ diet due toexposure of Indians to world cuisines and are in recent times also being cultivated in India under controlled conditions. Thecommon exotic vegetables in India are lettuce, broccoli, cherry tomato, red cabbage, coloured capsicum etc. The present studywas carried out to investigate the consumers purchasing pattern of exotic vegetables in Dharwad and Hyderabad cities ofKarnataka and Telangana states respectively. The sample taken for the study was 120 consumers (Dharwad-60 and Hyderabad- 60)through purposive random sampling technique. The results revealed that majority of the consumers were of middle aged group(36-50 years) belonging to small families and were highly educated. Most of the consumers had high income which made themmore innovative in trying these vegetables. For majority of the respondents the source of information and motivation to buythese vegetables were friends, family, and internet. The results with regards to purchasing, indicate that most of the respondentspreferred to buy these vegetables occasionally and also preferred to purchase them from retail chain outlets like More, Reliancefresh, Spencer’s, Big Bazaar etc., because of its non availability in local markets. Being new and not part of the regular diet ofmost of the consumers, they purchase these vegetables in small quantities of up to 0.5 kg only. Freshness and price were themain attributes affecting the consumer’s decision in purchase of these exotic vegetables.