Firstly, this article aimed at examining the psychological process in the evaluation of food safety. We hypothesized that peoples' subjective evaluation of food safety consists of three psychological aspects: the perceived safety of treatment, the perceived safety of food-itself, and the affective response. The second aim of the article was to show both the difference and commonality in the psychological process among the peoples in subgroups in the food system of fresh vegetables: famers, wholesalers, processors, retailers, and consumers. Thus, we employed 10 independent variables including compliance, informational openness, and groundless perception of safety, which were hypothesized to influence the three aspects of the evaluation. Using the data on a sample of 1, 201 people regarding their opinion of fresh vegetables, path analyses by Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) revealed that our model was valid and that people in each subgroup had both the common processes and the different ones. The perceived safety of treatment had the largest effect on the evaluation on safety of fresh vegetable in all subgroups. Compliance and groundless perception of safety were also effective in all subgroups.However, the complexity of the process differed within the subgroups; the consumers had the simplest process and the retailers had the most complex one. These phenomena were discussed for their implications on risk management and risk communication.

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Recently, building of a “regional brand” has been one of the most important issues in agricultural marketing. This article discusses an application of the images of region for building brands of agricultural products. For this purpose, the author takes “Kyoto-niku” an instance of a “regional brand, ” and investigates what ideas the final consumer associates the Kyoto-like food and “Kyoto-niku” with.
This article consists of two parts: (1) the consideration on the building of brands, noting with a concern for using a place-name; and (2) the research on the images to “Kyoto-niku” and Kyoto-like food. The former part pointed out that there could be three types of brands related to agricultural products: (1) the brands of the agricultural products themselves; (2) the brands of the producer groups of agricultural products; and (3) the brands of certain areas. In the interview survey in the latter part, the Repertory Grid Technique (Fransella, Bell, and Bannister, 2003) was used. And the data was processed by the singular value method (a classical multi dimensional scaling), and examined by cluster analysis.
As a result of the analysis, the images that the respondents of the research associate the Kyotolike foods with were classified into two main clusters: (1) the representative Kyoto-like foods; and (2) the foods that were familiar to them in their daily life. With this result, the author attempted to interpret on how the marketing strategy could be done to link “Kyoto-niku” with each cluster. These steps mentioned above could offer a practical suggestion for building various “regional brands” better than by a traditional analysis of the price differentials.

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In order to understand consumer behavior, it is important to clarify not only the features thatconsumers value while purchasing rice but also the reasons underlying their preference.This paperclarifies the reasons why consumers value certain features in the rice they purchase, by employing aladdering approach. Further, in order to collect a large number of samples, respondents weresurveyed not via interviews but through mailed questionnaires. The collection of data was done byfixed free description wherein the respondents were free to write their responses, albeit inaccordance with a regulated format. Text mining was used to analyze the large amount of data thatwas collected.
The following results were obtained. There were two reasons why rice produced in a prefecture was valued by its residents-safety concerns and extension of support to regional agriculture. The reason why the option of “the price is low” was chosen by respondents was because it increased their savings; this, in turn, allowed them to spend the money saved on other services that helped them enjoy life. There were three reasons why respondents valued the category of “it is delicious even when cold”-for saving time, for making box lunches, and for taste.
In addition, the analysis of key words revealed that consumers who valued “rice produced in the prefecture” and “known producers” hoped to enjoy a sense of safety more than the consumers who valued “rice that had less pesticide.” It was also suggested that these reasons differed depending on consumer attributes.

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