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The purpose of this paper is to provide a better understanding of what well-being means to children in the food context and to formulate recommendations about the way food retailers may take actions to promote children’s food well-being (FWB).

A qualitative study based on a child-centric perspective is conducted with 25 French children aged 6–11 years. The data collection and analysis use both verbal and graphic data methods including focus groups and drawings in order to help children express their feelings and thoughts.

The findings put forward that according to children, the concept of FWB relies on five dimensions: sensory taste, health, commensality, empowerment and altruistic behaviours. Their discourses suggest that food practices contributes to objective, hedonic, eudaemonic and social well-being on the short and long term.

Based on children’s intrinsic needs for pleasure and empowerment, our recommendations highlight how food retailers might rethink their own-label offering, retail environment and communication to take into account young consumers’ FWB.

Drawing upon the concept of FWB and positive psychology, the authors do not only examine children’s food representations through a nutritional lens, but enlarge the scope to show how physical, emotional, psychological and social factors, involved in food context, contribute to different aspects of well-being.

While recent academic research on entomophagy has predominantly focused on adults, the purpose of this child-centred research is to obtain a better understanding of young consumer acceptance of insect-based foods.

Two qualitative studies were conducted with a total of 43 French children aged 8–13 years. Study 1 (n = 22), based on semi-directive interviews, and Study 2 (n = 21), based on focus groups, included projective techniques and exposure to different types of insect-based products to help children express their feelings and thoughts.

The evidence shows that in Western children’s minds, insects are considered as culturally non-edible. Children predominantly reject insects as food because of their sensory properties and the disgust they arouse. However, their interest in eating insect-based food is embedded within experiential contexts specific to childhood, in particular the peer group, which makes insect-eating fun and challenging, and the family, which offers a protective and reassuring setting.

The authors advocate changing children’s sensory perception of insect-eating food through sensory and participatory activities. Manufacturers and policymakers should also draw on children’s peer culture to associate insect-eating with positive social experiences and foster peer influence.

Drawing on cognitive psychology theories and the literature in food science on food rejection, the authors contribute to emerging consumer research on alternative food consumption (AFC) focusing on cognitive, emotional and social factors of acceptance or rejection of insect-based foods by children.

This paper aims to examine the image realism effect, studying how changing the front-of-package visual affects the acceptance of an insect-based food by consumers. By comparing reactions to realistic and less realistic images of an insect as an ingredient, this research investigated how visual imagery can affect consumers’ responses, reducing perceived disgust or increasing expected taste.

Three experiments studied the impact of realistic (photo) versus less realistic (drawing) images for two types of insects (mealworm, cricket) on consumers’ psychological distance from the image, perceived disgust, expected taste, willingness to eat, purchase intention and food choice.

Study 1 demonstrates that using a less realistic insect image reduces perceived disgust, with psychological distance from this image and perceived disgust mediating realism effect on willingness to eat. Study 2 shows that a less realistic insect image, perceived as more remote, improves expected taste and willingness to eat. Study 3 confirms the results by measuring behavior: consumers were more likely to choose the product with the less realistic image.

The research focused on one kind of product and two ways of depicting this product, limiting the generalizability of the findings for other visual representations and product categories.

The findings suggest how brand managers can use the image realism effect on the packaging of novel, sustainable products to influence consumers, reducing their disgust and increasing their expected taste.

This research breaks new ground by explaining how visual cues on packaging affect the acceptance of insect-eating, drawing on construal level theory.

This paper aims to explore the role played by food brands within children’s peer groups when they have a meal together.

Sixty-four elementary-aged children participated in one of ten organized snack times (five with unbranded products, five with branded products). Based on a qualitative methodology, data collection methods comprise observations and focus groups with the children.

Children mostly select the products according to their taste preference regardless of the brand name. They make individual decisions and are hardly influenced by their peers. Children use food brands as a common language to designate products, but they do not use them to convey their self-identity and enhance social integration.

This research contributes to a better understanding of the way children use food brands within peer group, and may be helpful when considering the future of children’s food marketing and tackling the issue of childhood obesity.

Whereas prior research has mostly studied the social value allocated by children to durable goods’ brands, such as clothing and electronic items, very few previous studies have focused on food brands.

Brands that target children frequently use a brand character to improve children's recall and recognition and to develop a relationship with young consumers. This paper aims to explore the reasons why marketers use brand characters to target children and how children perceive and understand them.

This work investigates both managers' and children's experiences, in order to compare them. Two studies are carried out: one with managers in charge of brand characters and another one with children aged between six and ten. In both cases, a qualitative approach based on semi‐focused interviews is adopted.

This research contributes to a better understanding of the way children infer brand image from brand character. Second, it highlights a success key factor of brand character: its ability to build a close relationship with children. In addition it points out how this relationship can be fostered.

By exploring managers' and children's viewpoints, this research suggests some levers to build children's relationship with brand character and improve children's brand loyalty. This article gives an insight into the way brand character establishes a close relationship with children. In particular, it underlines that a child feels all the closer to a character if the character is used in the long‐term and has experiences that resonate with his/her life.

Drawing on Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, this research aims to investigate the interweaving of the socialization systems within which children learn eating practices, in order to open up new paths to build prevention and care programs against childhood obesity.

Children were interviewed using semi‐structured interviews, including projective methods. The data were analyzed by both a manual content analysis and the use of qualitative analysis software Nvivo. Nvivo enables to cross verbatim and contributes to highlight the joint effects of socialization agents in terms of children's eating learning.

The study clarifies the interrelationships between social contexts in which children learn food practices. It points out that the different social spheres may sometimes exert contradictory influences and that food learning cannot be limited to the transmission of nutritional information, but also involves emotional and social experiences.

By showing that eating habits stem from complex processes, the research suggests measures against children's obesity that take into account the interrelationships between social contexts. It invites the policymakers and the food companies to implement actions based on social relationships involved in food learning.

Whereas the traditional consumer socialization models focus on interactions between child and one socialization agent, this research's findings shed light on the entanglement of social spheres concerning eating socialization. They show that using a social‐ecological approach is useful to policymakers, researchers, marketers, and other constituencies involved in developing solutions to the obesity problem.

The purpose of this paper is to offer some insight into how siblings aged between 4 and 12, engaged in a collaborative drawing activity at home, recall the shopping trips they have experienced.

Using a Vygotskian perspective, the data collection consisted of engaging 15 pairs of siblings in the production of a joint drawing of a shop of their choice. Drawing in pairs opens a Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978) where the younger child benefits from verbal guidance by the older one to achieve the common task. This situation enables the researcher to gain close access to children’s knowledge about stores and to the words they use to describe their personal shopping experiences.

This exploratory research reveals some constitutive elements of children’s “shopscapes” (Nicol, 2014), i.e. the imaginary geographies they actively elaborate through their daily practices and experiences with regard to retail environments. In their communicative interactions when elaborating a joint drawing of the shop they have chosen, children demonstrate that they master a considerable body of knowledge about retail environments. Surprisingly, recalling their shopping practices sheds light on various anxiety-generating dimensions.

The data collection is based on a remembering exercise performed at home and does not bring information about what children actually do in retail environments. Moreover, the children were asked to focus on buying a present for a friend’s birthday, therefore the information gathered essentially relates to toy stores.

This research underlines the necessity for retailers to endeavour to reduce some of the anxious feelings depicted and verbalized by children, by improving the welcome for children into their stores.

There are also opportunities for retailers to invest in the consumption education area by guiding young visitors so that they learn how to behave as apprentice consumers in retail outlets.

The child-centric perspective of the study reveals new and surprising insights about the way children report their memorised shopping experiences.