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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how vegetable side components (carrot and broccoli) influence children’s associations and expected liking of two common Norwegian dishes (meatballs and salmon).

Children aged 11-12 years old were recruited to complete an adapted free association test (n=89). Each participant was exposed to four pictures of dishes that included combinations of the experimental food items served with potatoes and sauce. Participants stated their immediate associations and how much they liked each meal on a five-point smiley face scale for children. Evoked associations were coded and categorized before the relationship between the expected liking of the dishes and the associations were visualized based on correspondence analysis.

The authors found that the expected liking of the dishes was significantly affected by the composition of the dish, that the associations related to the meal changed when the vegetable component changed, and that children’s associations to food are quite similar to what previous studies have found for adults.

How children categorize complex dishes and how their mental representation explains expected liking has rarely been investigated before. By investigating how dishes with different components activate different associations and how these associations co-occur with children’s expected liking of the dishes, the authors gain knowledge that can help us develop strategies for improved dietary change.

The overall aim of this research is to increase understanding of consumers' barriers in relation to convenience food. While the motivation for consuming convenience food has been investigated frequently, few studies have investigated the barriers.

Three focus group studies, exploring consumers' ready‐to‐heat (RTH) meal dilemmas, were conducted in Norway.

The frequency of barriers and four narratives are presented, and the results indicate that consumers face bottom‐up dilemmas related to barriers like sensory perception, health, economy, and managing relationships; and/or top‐down value dilemmas related to traditions, quality of life and environmental barriers when considering convenience food consumption.

This research contributes to the current body of literature, which mainly focuses on drivers of convenience demand, by elaborating on barriers and dilemmas for convenience choice.

The findings imply how marketers should communicate with the convenience market. Marketing managers need to understand which barriers to break or what dilemmas to discuss when communicating with the RTH market.

By structuring focus group interviews according to the individual respondents (“who said what”) and by presenting the data as narratives, the paper shows a new way to analyze focus group interviews.

Most new product development (NPD) studies focus on manufacturer brands; few consider distributor brands. The purpose of this paper to investigate whether NPD processes and outcomes differ between manufacturers and distributors.

Interviews within the grocery industry in Norway and analysis of sales numbers from an AC Nielsen ScanTrack database illustrate that through different NPD processes manufacturers and distributors reach different outcomes.

Distributors differ from manufacturers in the NPD process in several ways: more in‐store interaction resulting in very market‐driven products. They usually outsource technical development, and launch brands with substantially less market communication through fewer marketing channels. Distributors, who mostly develop copycat products of large volume manufacturer brands, have lower failure rates. More surprisingly, the paper reveals that distributor brands achieve faster growth in market share than manufacturer brands when brand concentration is low, and some low volume distributor brands have a higher average retail price than manufacturer brands, indicating that different private label categories exist.

The sample has only three product categories (pizza, juice, and jam). Replication with other categories in other industries would help validate the results. The distributor NPD process and outcomes are still not well understood, and as distributors move into more value‐added products it will evolve, requiring further research.

This is one of the first empirical investigations of differences in NPD processes and outcomes between manufacturer and distributor brands. It also shows the effect of brand concentration on distributor brand growth.

The purpose of this paper is to examine consumer attitudes towards apple juice produced by means of two new processing technologies, high‐pressure processing (HPP) and pulsed electric field processing (PEF).

Means‐end chain approach is used. Laddering interviews are conducted with consumers in Norway, Denmark, Hungary and Slovakia.

Consumers in this study did recognize and appreciate the benefits that HPP and PEF apple juice have to offer over a juice produced by pasteurization. The respondents in all four countries associated positive consequences with product attributes related to the nutritional value and the taste of the products produced by means of these novel technologies. Also the environmental benefits from processing foods by applying these technologies were seen as highly positive characteristics of the technologies. However, many respondents also expressed some scepticism, especially towards the PEF treated juice and were unsure about if there were risks associated with consuming products processed by this technology.

When new processing technologies are introduced, consumer acceptance is one of the key issues for their future success. It is up to food producers and food scientists to provide the evidence that will convince consumers that these new technologies are safe to use.

This research contributes to the limited knowledge on consumer attitudes towards food products produced by HPP and PEF. From a general perspective, the research expands the body of knowledge on consumer perception of food technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a theoretical model of narrow and broad market scanning in a service industry, including short‐ and long‐term outcomes.

In a cross‐sectional survey, structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses on a sample of 126 hotel managers in Norway.

Given that services often involve direct interaction between the customer and the provider, customers play a more active role in the service development process. This has ramifications for how service firms scan their environment and, in turn, for incremental and discontinuous innovation. It is found that narrow and broad scanning each affect the new service development process in a unique way. Narrow scanning has a strong positive effect on profitability through incremental service adaptation; broad scanning has a weak but significant effect on profitability through incremental service adaptation, and broad scanning positively influences spin‐off knowledge.

The two greatest limitations of the research, which translate into important avenues for future research, are to develop a better measure of discontinuous innovation, and to test the model in an alternative setting, because hotels are very dependent on locality and surroundings.

When developing services, services managers must distinguish between short‐ and long‐term performance, and how they scan their markets. Adapting to customers to the exclusion of exploring new opportunities threatens long‐term viability.

The paper offers the following advice: as with organizational learning, service firms need to scan their markets by design, not default.