Study On The Influencing Factors Of Urban Residents’ Consumption Behavior Of Edible Vegetable Oils

Edible vegetable oils are an important part of people’s diet, providing necessary nutrition and energy for them. Since the beginning of 21 st century, Chinese residents’ income and life standard keep improving and Chinese oils and oil plants markets further opening up. Meanwhile, Chinese residents’ edible oils consumption keeps increasing, the average edible oils consumption per capita rising by an average annual growth rate of 5.85%, from 6.43 kg/year in 2000 to 11.07 kg/year in 2014, and the number is likely to increase further. At the same time, thanks to the policy of forbidding oil crops from taking land from food crops, the increase of oil crops planting cost and the competition from cheaper imported oil and oil crops, China has imported more and more edible vegetable oils from abroad and its foreign-trade dependency degree keeps growing from 35% in 2000 to 60% in 2014, and the number may become bigger. Rapeseed oil, soybean oil and peanut oil are traditional and main edible vegetable oils in China, and their industry security situations are not promising. China’s soybean squeezing industry has almost been monopolized by foreign-funded enterprises, the import of rapeseed and rapeseed oil keeps increasing and soybean oil is the only kind of edible vegetable oil to keep self-sufficient. All in all, China’s edible oil industry security is in a bad situation.Industrial development is closely related to consumers’ demand, and the development and security of China’s edible vegetable oil industry is closely related to Chinese residents’ consumption behavior. Therefore, in this essay, urban residents have been taken as study object, Theory of Planed Behavior and former studies have been used, and investigation about urban residents’ edible vegetable oils consumption behavior among three traditional edible vegetable oil main production areas, including six cities of Wuhan, Xianning, Liaoning, Dalian, Qingdao and Rizhao, have been carried out so as to study the features of urban residents’ edible vegetable oils consumption behavior and analyze its influencing factors. Besides, residents’ consumption behaviors in three different main production areas have been compared to study the regional differences.After theoretical and empirical analysis, the study comes to these conclusions: women in charge of family daily-use articles purchase among 31 to 40 years old are the main purchase group of edible vegetable oils; urban residents in soybean oil and peanut oil main production areas show obvious preference to local-produced oils while urban residents in rapeseed oil main production area don’t; urban residents in three areas all show greater interest in new kinds of edible vegetable oils and their consumption proportion keeps increasing in recent years; urban residents’ evaluation on edible vegetable oils after purchase and publicity means such as commercial ads and discounts are the main factors influencing their consumption behavior; the influencing degree of those factors on urban residents are different in three different main production areas.