Schwartz Value Theory is often used to study the relationship between values and consumer behavior (Schwartz, 1992). A few studies have proven the influence of values on pro-environment behavior such as the reduction of household carbon dioxide emissions (Steg et al., 2005), waste recycling, and resource utilization (Milfont et al., 2010), and green consumption behavior. For example, Homer and Kahle (1988) point out that the value dimensions will affect the natural food purchase. Kim and Kim (2010) propose that Korean consumer values affect the choice of green products through their attitude toward the environment.

The theory of Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) puts forward the egoistic value, altruistic value, and biosphere value, which are the main values related to environmental problems and can predict specific environmental behavior (Stern et al., 1999; Stern, 2000; Prakash et al., 2019). Altruistic values describe the situation under which peoples act on behalf of others while expecting no personal benefits (Schwartz, 1968). Instead, egoistic values mean acting on behalf of oneself or expecting personal benefits such as eliminating the suffering and harm of oneself (Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002). For organic consumption, egoistic values mean that consumers want food to be beneficial to their health, while altruistic values mean consumers concerning no pollution to the environment. The research has considered both values as individuals’ consumption of organic food shows their concern toward the self-benefits as well as toward the environmental benefits (Kareklas et al., 2014). Yadav (2016) takes health concern (HC) and environmental concern (EC) as proxy variables of egoistic and altruistic values to investigate their impact on organic food purchase intention. ECs and HCs have always been the two most common motivations for organic food purchases (Wandel and Bugge, 1997). This study believes that values, as an abstract cognition existing in one’s heart, will have a positive impact on consumers’ motivation as well as purchase behavior intentions.

Values are the abstract expression of the subconscious, while motivation is a relatively concrete concept, which reflects an individual’s corresponding behavior or response stimulated by some factors. Motivation builds a bridge between values and behavioral intention, transforming abstract conceptual values into specific behaviors (Shen, 1994; Zhang, 2008). Accordingly, the hypotheses are proposed as follows:

Food safety, taste and freshness, environmental protection, and animal welfare are the common motivations of organic food consumption (Hemmerling et al., 2015; Rana and Paul, 2020). Among them, the health aspect is proved to be one of the two most prominent motivations for consumers to buy organic foods in Europe, Australia, Asia, and the United States (Schleenbecker and Hamm, 2013; Rizzo et al., 2020; Nafees et al., 2022). The importance of environmental preservation and food security is also found to be the main reason for buying organic foods in the Asian developing organic market (Sirieix et al., 2011; Teng and Lu, 2016; Ahangarkolaee and Gorton, 2020; Lin et al., 2021). Based on the review findings, the present study considers HC and EC as the dominant motives related to the decision of organic food consumption in a Chinese context.

The HC among individuals shows concern for self or to their family, so in nature, it is egoistic (Magnusson et al., 2003). HCs reflect the influence of egoistic values, that is, they want to keep themselves and their families healthy (Massey et al., 2018). Egoistic values drive consumers to pay more attention to health-related issues and then affect individual consumption decisions. Organic foods are considered to be healthier and more nutritious (Grankvist and Biel, 2001; Lea and Worsley, 2005) because they are produced without any harmful chemical fertilizers (Pino et al., 2012). When purchasing organic foods, health-related problems and safety concerns are considered as the main motivating factors (Goetzke and Spiller, 2014; Le-Anh and Nguyen-To, 2020). More specifically, the desire for body health and wellbeing drives the demand in food markets. Extensive empirical studies show that HCs are among the important drivers for developing a positive intention toward organic food consumption (Schifferstein and Ophuis, 1998; Kareklas et al., 2014; Yadav, 2016).

On the other hand, EC can be regarded as altruistic in nature because individuals are aware of the consequences of environmental problems and are willing to make efforts to protect the environment with little thought of benefits for themselves (Dunlap and Jones, 2002; Thøgersen, 2011; Wang et al., 2020). Personal concerns for the environment are related to consumers’ altruistic value or altruistic purchase considerations as consumers often choose organic food products due to consumers’ thinking that the production mode of organic foods does not harm the environment and has the attribute of ecological friendliness (Lee and Hwang, 2016). It has been suggested that the choice of organic foods over traditional food indicates consumers’ concern for others and the common interests (Thøgersen, 2011; Kareklas et al., 2014). EC shows the degree to which consumers are aware of environmental problems and support efforts to solve them or express their willingness to contribute personally to solve the problems (Dunlap and Jones, 2002). A growing body of literature on organic food consumption suggests that environmental concern plays a crucial role in influencing the consumption intention of organic foods as buying organic foods, which is considered to be a behavior beneficial to the environment (Kareklas et al., 2014; Hansmann et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2021). Accordingly, the hypotheses are proposed as follows:

In the consumption scenario, uncertainty refers to the fact that due to information asymmetry, consumers face difficulty obtaining the complete product information or have doubts about the information obtained (Vieira, 2008), which will reduce the consumer’s purchase intention (Shiu et al., 2011). Some studies show that consumers tend to be skeptical about organic foods (Vermeir and Verbeke, 2006; Janssen and Hamm, 2011) as lacking the relevant knowledge or an insufficient understanding of organic labeling will produce perceived uncertainty (Janssen and Hamm, 2011). Additionally, consumers may be confused by the existence of multiple organic certification bodies because it is difficult to accurately evaluate the authenticity of organic certification, which also decreases consumer trust and further hinders organic consumption (Wang and He, 2016). Sometimes, eco-labels may send irrelevant, confusing, or even detrimental messages to consumers (Delmas and Lessem, 2017).

Prior research has indicated that perceived uncertainty negatively affects trust and the intention of purchasing organic foods (e.g., Yiridoe et al., 2005; Shiu et al., 2011). Especially, Vermeir and Verbeke (2006) emphasize the importance of mental processing uncertainty in organic food consumption. When consumers perceive a higher uncertainty, the more uncertain they are about the knowledge of organic foods, and the more difficult is to judge whether the organic food consumption decision is correct (Yiridoe et al., 2005). As Thøgersen (2009) suggests uncertainty may prevent people from purchasing organic foods even though they have favorable attitudes. Accordingly, even though consumers have strong motivations to buy organic foods, a higher level of perceived uncertainty may reduce the willingness to buy organic foods. In contrast, if the information about organic foods is credible, sufficient, and easy to obtain, the level of uncertainty may be reduced and a higher motivation will further strengthen consumers’ organic consumption behavior (De Magistris and Gracia, 2008; Teng and Lu, 2016). Therefore, it is speculated that perceived uncertainty will moderate a relationship between motives and organic purchase intention. Therefore, we proposed the hypothesis H5:

It is important content in the field of consumer behavior to study the antecedents of consumer behavior intention from the perspective of values and motivation. However, in view of the vague boundary between the two concepts of values and motivation, existing studies usually only consider some factors and pay less attention to the complete causality from values to motivation to behavior. Zhang (2008) constructed the VMB model and then verified that values affect college students’ motivation to buy overseas study service products, and this motivation affects further purchase behavior. Drawing on the VMB model, Gao et al. (2014) explored the relationship among Confucian values, motivation, and TV purchase behavior of Chinese farmers. Recent studies have verified the driving effect of values on motivations, attitudes, and subsequent behaviors from different contexts (Hidalgo-Baz et al., 2017; Tarabashkina et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2021; Teah et al., 2021). Therefore, this study follows the same theoretical model, combined with the above literature discussion and hypothesis deduction, and constructs the following conceptual model (Figure 1) in the context of organic food consumption.

We designed a structured questionnaire to take a survey. The questionnaire includes two sections. In the first section, we measured the constructs. In the second section, we collected demographic information including gender, age, marriage, occupation, education, average monthly income, and the experience of organic food purchase.

In this study, multi-item scales are used to measure the constructs. To ensure the validity of the scale used in the survey, the items were adapted from the relevant research and existing literature. These scales are adopted from previous studies and modified to fit the theme and context of this study. The measurement items are backtranslated by native speakers to confirm that the contents and meanings are consistent with the original wordings. All items are assessed with the five-point Likert scales, ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 5 (“strongly agree”).

In this study, a professional market research consulting company in China was entrusted to collect the data from January to March 2020. As the questionnaires were obtained by intercepting interviews at the entrance of the supermarkets located in Nangang District, Daoli District, Daowai District, Xiangfang District, and Songbei District of Harbin, convenience sampling methods were adopted. A total of 2,000 questionnaires were collected. After excluding 933 questionnaires with missing data, invalid answers, and subjects without organic food purchase experience, 1,067 valid questionnaires were retained. The demographic profiles of the sample are shown in Table 1.

The confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to measure the reliability and validity of the data. The initial CFA results show that the CFA fit indices represented an appropriate model fit (x² = 928.575, df = 224, x²/df = 4.145, CFI = 0.922, AGFI = 0.903, IFI = 0.923, GFI = 0.928, RMSEA = 0.054). Further, we measured the convergent and discriminant validity to ensure data validity. The value of Cronbach’s α ranges from 0.704 to 0.831 which is well above the acceptable limit of 0.7, suggesting good internal reliability among the items of each construct. Factor loading and average variance extracted (AVE) were used to test the convergent validity. After deleting “I plan to buy organic food in the next two weeks” and “there is too much organic food information for me to make a reasonable choice” with low factor loading, the factor loading of all items is above 0.5, which meets the criterion. The value of AVE was above or close to 0.5. The composite reliability (CR) values of each construct exceeded the threshold of 0.60 (from 0.682 to 0.831), showing an ideal internal consistency among the construct items. Please refer to Table 2 for the detailed results of reliability and convergent validity.

Finally, the discriminant validity was evaluated. The square root of the AVE of each construct was higher than its correlation value. In addition, Brown (2006) suggested that to ensure the validity of discrimination, the correlation value between all constructs should be less than 0.8. Please refer to Table 3 for the detailed results of discriminant validity.

This study aims to investigate and understand the significance of altruistic and egoistic values in determining consumers’ willingness to buy organic foods in the context of China, which is the largest developing nation in the world. The findings report that both altruistic and egoistic values play a significant role in determining the motives and intention toward purchasing organic foods, which verifies the significance of stable value orientations in explaining people’s consumption intention of organic foods (Chen, 2020). Specifically, the altruistic value is found to influence the consumer’s EC, and the egoistic value is found to influence the consumer’s HC. The finding is consistent with Yadav (2016) as they report that both EC and egoistic HC significantly influence the attitude and intention toward purchasing organic foods among Indian youth. In addition, it is found that, compared to EC, the HC has a stronger impact on the consumer’s intention of buying organic foods. The findings support the study of Magnusson et al. (2003) and Yadav (2016) that when consumers decide to buy organic foods, the egoistic motive is more influential compared to an altruistic motive.

The results of this empirical study in the context of China confirm the previous findings (e.g., Yiridoe et al., 2005; Vermeir and Verbeke, 2006; Schleenbecker and Hamm, 2013; Hemmerling et al., 2015; Teng and Lu, 2016; Ahangarkolaee and Gorton, 2020; Nafees et al., 2022) that the consumer’s health consciousness, food safety concerns, and ecological motives, which are the subdimensions of organic consumption motives and are all positively related to involvement with organic foods. Specifically, a consumer with HC is more likely to take health-related behavior and consume organic foods, which are related to their internal needs for health and safety (Hill and Lynchehaun, 2002; Bezençon and Blili, 2010; Michaelidou and Hassan, 2010).

Furthermore, those who are conscious of environmental protection and animal welfare are more involved in organic food consumption, which is consistent with some previous results (e.g., Chen, 2007; Hjelmar, 2011; Teng and Lu, 2016) but is also inconsistent with other findings (e.g., Zakowska-Biemans, 2011; Zagata, 2012). Zakowska-Biemans (2011) also mention that although people widely recognize the importance of environmental protection and animal welfare, it is not relevant to the organic purchase decision. Nevertheless, researchers claim that the consumers with ecological motives are more involved in an ethical product decision (Bezençon and Blili, 2010), which further has a positive impact on consumers’ intention of purchasing organic foods. In this research, the finding of a positive effect of ecological motives reconfirms the results of Chen (2007), Teng and Lu (2016), and Zhu (2018), indicating that consumers in China pay attention to environmental protection in their daily food intake, so they are more likely to consume organic foods related to environmental values.

In addition to the effects of consumption motives on consumers’ willingness to buy organic foods, this study also confirms the mediating effect of consumption motives on the relationship between altruistic values, egoistic values, and organic purchase intention. The results show that consumption value and consumption motivation are two different concepts. Mixing consumption motivation with values (such as Yadav, 2016) prevented us from understanding the complete mechanism of value-motivation-behavior. In fact, our research has proven that the values rooted in an individual’s heart affect the purchase behavior of organic foods through driving consumption motivation. Whether in the relationship between egoistic values or altruistic values and organic food purchase intention, the mediating effect of EC is stronger than that of HC. In the past, many studies have concluded that the effect of HC motivation is greater than that of EC motivation (Magnusson et al., 2003). The possible reason for this result is that with a continuous deterioration of the environment, people increasingly feel that their survival and development are under a direct threat. Therefore, the awareness and willingness of environmental protection of Chinese consumers are gradually increasing, which makes the EC motivation play an increasingly important role.

This study also found that perceived uncertainty significantly weakens the positive impact of HC on the purchase intention of organic foods. Such a result shows that even though buying organic food is normally considered better for health than conventional foods, feeling a strong uncertainty would hinder the influence of HC on the purchase decision of organic foods. This is because the perceived risk caused by incomplete information and uncertainty may have a negative effect on consumer purchase intention (Hassan et al., 2013). When consumers feel uncertain about the consequences of eating organic foods, they are unlikely to make a decision to buy organic foods because they do not possess the relevant knowledge and information to accurately predict the outcome of organic food consumption (Thøgersen, 2009; Chen and Huang, 2013).

Surprisingly, this study found that perceived uncertainty significantly weakens the influence of EC on the intention of organic purchasing, which shows that a strong sense of uncertainty would promote the influence of EC on the purchase decision of organic foods. The higher the perceived uncertainty, the stronger the impact of EC on the intention of purchasing organic foods. In other words, the lower the perceived uncertainty, the weaker the influence of EC on the intention of purchasing organic food. In terms of the main effect, the motivation to care about environmental protection urges consumers to think about the benefits of organic foods to the environment. When they confirm that organic food planting is beneficial to environmental protection (such as less use of pesticides and fertilizers), they are more willing to buy organic foods. However, the lower the feelings of uncertainty about organic foods, that is, the higher the feelings of certainty, the weaker their willingness to consume organic foods. This may be that the more consumers think that they have related knowledge about organic foods (note that this knowledge may include not only the health benefits of organic foods, but also the negative effects of organic foods on the environment), the more they doubt the benefits of organic food planting on environmental protection, so it weakens the influence of environmental motivation on the willingness to purchase organic foods. Chinese consumers’ cognition of organic foods mainly focuses on health and taste because in most Chinese people’s understanding, organic cultivation is actually the traditional agricultural cultivation method (such as using human and animal excrement as a fertilizer), and the traditional planting method also has a certain negative impact on the environment. In fact, whether organic agriculture is good or bad for the ecological environment is still a controversial topic in the scientific community. Therefore, when consumers’ perception of organic foods is uncertain, they usually follow the mainstream cognition of society, that is, organic agriculture does not use chemically synthesized pesticides and fertilizers, which are conducive to an ecological balance. However, when consumers learn more about the process of organic food cultivation, they may find the disadvantages of organic agriculture, such as the need for more arable land due to low yield, thus reducing the forest area.³

The findings of this study are conducive to guiding the development of the organic food industry. Some management implications and suggestions from the results of this research are as follows.

According to this study, two kinds of consumption motives have positive influences on consumers’ willingness to buy organic foods. Moreover, the two values have positive influences on the related consumption motives, and then have a positive impact on the intention of organic food consumption. The empirical results show that marketers in the organic food section should understand the needs, values, and benefits of organic foods perceived by consumers with each consumption motive in terms of health and environmental aspects with the aim to make effective marketing communication strategies. Specifically, marketers should use the most authoritative scientific evidence to emphasize the health and safety of organic foods. If consumers feel more that organic foods can provide health and safety benefits to meet their health needs, they will become more willing to consume organic foods. Similarly, marketers should let consumers with an environmental motivation understand that the production and packaging of organic foods are carried out in a way that protects the environment (Lockie et al., 2002). In this way, consumers can be confident that organic food production strictly abides by environmental principles, which will strengthen their organic purchasing behavior. Marketing personnel should aim to improve consumers’ awareness and knowledge of organic products to promote consumption (Marreiros et al., 2021).

Besides, the results show that perceived uncertainty has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between the consumer’s health motives and the purchase intention of organic products. As the perceived uncertainty comes from consumers’ incomplete information and risk perception in the process of transaction, marketers should convince consumers by providing reliable information, so as to enhance consumers’ confidence in the health benefits of organic foods. The literature shows that to improve the ability of consumers to verify the attributes and values of organic foods publicized by organic food suppliers, it is necessary to establish public trust in the organic food certification system and organic food traceability system (Janssen and Hamm, 2011). Although the food traceability system is widely used in the organic food industry to reduce the information asymmetry between consumers and suppliers (Chen and Huang, 2013), the traditional food traceability system is difficult to ensure its objectivity and fairness, so the latest blockchain technology should be introduced. Blockchain food traceability system has the characteristics of full transparency, traceability tracking, and tamper proof, which can ensure the authenticity of the information. As China’s organic market is still in the development stage, it is very important to establish a reliable organic food system and provide reliable and comprehensive information for improving consumers’ confidence in organic foods.

Besides, the results indicate that perceived uncertainty has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between consumer environmental motives and the intention of organic purchase. This means that a strong sense of uncertainty toward organic foods positively moderates the influence of EC on consumers’ willingness to buy organic foods. Based on the aforementioned discussion, we believe that the agricultural sector needs to improve the environmental attributes of organic agriculture. In the process of developing from traditional organic agriculture to industrialized organic agriculture, practitioners should not only use scientific and technological means to ensure and strengthen the health and environmentally friendly attributes of organic foods but also reduce and eliminate the adverse factors on the environment in the process of organic agriculture planting, so that organic agriculture can truly evolve into green organic agriculture.

This study inevitably has some limitations. First, this study does not consider other values such as biosphere value and Confucian value, which were found to influence pro-environmental behavior (Shin et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2020). Second, this study did not conduct random sampling during the survey, which makes the representativeness of the sample insufficient. In the future, if we want to reveal Chinese consumers’ willingness to buy organic foods, it is necessary to carry out a large-scale random sampling survey. Finally, the self-report method used in this survey has its inherent defects. In the future, laboratory research methods can be considered to reveal and verify the impact mechanism of organic food consumption.