FSA Covid-19 Horizon Scanning

Background The Food Standards Agency commissioned social research to develop its evidence base on issues affecting consumers and businesses in order to inform its COVID-19 response. The COVID-19 consumer tracker ran for 19 months (19 waves) from April 2020 to October 2021, resulting in three reports (waves 1-5, 1-12 and 1-19). The monthly tracker was intended to understand consumers’ concerns around food insecurity and their experience of food unavailability, to understand and observe food behaviours that put consumers health and safety at risk and to understand the pattern and changes in food consumption and purchasing behaviours over the pandemic. The tracker has now been replaced with the ‘Consumer Insights Tracker’ (https://www.food.gov.uk/research/consumer-interests-aka-wider-consumer-interests/consumer-insights-tracker-april-2022-to-june-2023) (from November 2021 onwards) where similar measures are covered. Ipsos Mori were commissioned to track consumer attitudes through an omnibus survey. Bright Harbour were commissioned to produce qualitative reports on the lived experience of people living in food insecurity during COVID-19 and the impact on consumers’ engagement with the food system in June and July 2020. Additionally, we undertook in-house social media listening to support our insight gathering around the impact of COVID-19 on food safety, food authenticity and food regulation. In addition, the COVID-19 expert panel was set up to help identify the most important implications of the COVID-19 outbreak in relation to food policy. The FSA drew on its networks of leading researchers and industry experts between April and June 2020. Key findings Social media listening • Key themes included consumer purchasing behaviours, food delivery, restaurants’ response to lockdown and safety around new regulations and recommendations. • This short study demonstrated the potential use and inherent limitations of using social media to gain insight into people’s behaviour and attitudes. In context with survey and desk research data, social media listening helped to provide a more complete picture of how the public reacted to this pandemic in near real time. We concluded that social media analysis should be used to support other, more robust research and surveys. Data tables are available for each Wave on our open data catalogue (https://data.food.gov.uk/catalog/datasets/de3261ad-5f7b-4e57-aabc-a9e095aab285). You will also find guidance on how to use the data tables.