Study of Public Sentiment Using Social Media for Organic Foods in Pre-Covid and Post-Covid Times Worldwide

ABSTRACT

This study systematically assess the paradigm shift in consumer behavior during Pre-COVID and COVID scenarios using social media (data collected from Facebook, Twitter, Pin Interest, YouTube, Reviews & Forums, and Google Plus) platforms. The study analyzed 523,764 and 1,054,794 social media responses in Pre-COVID and COVID eras respectively. Due to the large volume of the data, for Pre-COVID era, responses from August to December 2019 were considered. For COVID era, responses from January to June 2020 were taken into the account. The organic food categories, considered in the study were Snacks, Fruits, Vegetables, Beers & Alcohol, Meat, Flour, Dairy, Cereals & Savories, Health Drink, Noodles & Fast Food, Dessert and Pizza & Pasta. In the study three-stage filtering for Sentiment Analysis was performed (86.4% accuracy achieved) using Natural Language Processing, Manual analysis of sentiment and Bi-Directional Encoder Representations from Transforms based model. It was concluded that in Pre-COVID era, people were less aware about the health benefits of organic food but in COVID era, the awareness level of consumers rose exponentially about various organic food categories, especially about processed organic food categories and benefits of raw organic food categories. In Pre-COVID Era, consumers were mainly focused on fresh fruits and vegetables. In COVID Era, food categories like Dairy, Meat and Vegetables were at the top. Fruits, snacks, beer and alcohol were also in high demand. While analyzing the Pre-COVID and COVID scenarios, we observed a shift in consumer behaviour from raw organic food categories towards processed and semi-processed organic food categories. Organic noodles & fast food, dessert and health drinks still remained as the least preferred food categories. The study is unique since it provides a macro and micro view of shift in consumer behavior preferences in Pre-COVID and COVID eras using social media at various geographical locations worldwide. This research will help manufacturers of organic food to reshape their existing consumer behavior and market penetration strategies. It will also help in new product designing and increasing the consumer base both at the local and global levels. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.