Microsoft Word 2007 ichrie conference Proceedings Final-Final 06-06-07. doc

Key Words:
Menu selection attributes, relative importance, conjoint analysis 
INTRODUCTION 
In the highly competitive foodservice environment, foodservice professionals should create a system that 
identifies the customers’ wants and needs as well as the primary factors affecting customers’ decision for buying 
food. This, in turn, will guide the foodservice operators to create products that fulfill customers’ desires. A buyer’s 
decision process starts with recognizing that a need can be satisfied through the acquisition of menu items. Once a 
need is recognized, the buyer will initiate an information search process, defined as “the motivated activation of 
knowledge” stored in the memory or the acquisition of information from the surrounding environment (Engel et al., 
1993), in order to be able to evaluate the existing alternatives. A customer’s decision process is very complicated 
with several attributes that interact, mutually trading off each value according to relative importance. Therefore, the 
need is to identify the important factors affecting the decision process occurring during customers’ menu selection.
Conjoint analysis is a decompositional method that estimates the structure of a consumer’s preferences 
given his or her overall evaluations of a set of alternatives that are pre-specified in terms of set of different attributes. 
It is designed to estimate the trade-offs people make when choosing among a number of alternative products and 
services (Green & Srinivasan, 1990). Since the early 1970s, conjoint analysis has received considerable academic 
and industry attention as a major set of techniques for measuring buyers’ tradeoffs among multi-attributed products 
and services (Johnson, 1974; Srinivasan et al., 1983). Conjoint analysis is also increasingly being applied with 
physical products as stimuli (e.g., food products/beverage).
Two basic assumptions are made in conjoint analysis. First, a product/service can be described as a 
combination of levels of a set of attributes. Second, these attribute levels determine consumers’ overall judgments of 
the product/service. Because of the substantial amount of among-person variation in consumer preferences, conjoint 
analysis usually is carried out at the individual level (Wittink & Montgomery, 1979; Moore, 1980).
Conjoint analysis is a very powerful tool for obtaining information about the effect of different product 
attributes on liking and/or purchase intent of food product (Louviere, 1988). The result of conjoint analysis indicates 
the relative importance of each attribute in terms of its contribution to the overall evaluation of the product.
A number of conceptual and empirical studies have attempted to address the key attributes of food and 
service quality related to customers’ satisfaction or preference using conjoint analysis (Baek et al., 2005; Koo et a1., 

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