Who actually eats traditional mountain foods? A new survey maps the gap

Knowing that a traditional mountain food exists and actually putting it on the plate turn out to be two very different hurdles. A new study published in Agricultural and Food Economics surveyed 3,001 Italian consumers about five traditional plant-based products from the mountains of the Veneto Region in northeastern Italy and found that the factors linked to product awareness are largely distinct from those linked to consumption among people who already know the product. The finding matters for anyone trying to keep marginal mountain agriculture economically alive, because a promotion campaign aimed at the wrong stage of consumer engagement may simply miss its target.

Four of the five are wild edible plants gathered seasonally in the Pre-Alpine and Alpine areas around the Asiago and Cansiglio plateaus, while Mais Sponcio is embedded in structured farming and local processing chains, marketed as polenta, chips, cookies, pasta and crispbreads. All five share a marginal market position relative to more established products, and all face erosion pressures, from land-use change and loss of traditional knowledge for the wild plants to replacement by high-yield hybrids for the maize.

The stakes are structural rather than merely culinary. Mountain areas account for roughly 40 percent of the European Union’s surface area but contribute only about 8 percent of its overall agricultural production, and EU regions with a very high share of mountainous terrain face a greater than 50 percent probability of high or very high land abandonment risk according to research cited in the paper. Low profitability and climatic and morphological constraints drive farm exit and rural depopulation, which is why the authors frame consumer demand for traditional products as a potential market-based complement to public support under the Common Agricultural Policy, which alone has not closed income gaps between mountain and non-mountain farming.

Methodologically, the study’s central move is to treat consumer engagement as a sequence rather than a single outcome. Each respondent was classified into one of three ordered statuses for each product: not aware of it, aware but not consuming it, or an aware consumer. The data come from a computer-assisted web survey administered in autumn 2024 by a professional company, with quotas based on official statistics for gender and geographical region and quality checks excluding speeders. The authors then estimated continuation-ratio logit models, a statistical specification designed for ordered categories that represent successive stages of a process, so that the first transition models the probability of moving from non-awareness to awareness, and the second models the probability of moving from awareness to consumption, conditional on already being aware. A non-parallel specification allowed the two sets of coefficients to differ, and a separate model was estimated for each of the five products.

The descriptive picture already reveals how unevenly these foods are known. Mais Sponcio is by far the least familiar, with around 78 percent of respondents unaware of it. Caraway shows the highest engagement, with 53.0 percent of respondents classified as aware consumers. Dandelion also performs relatively well, but notably as awareness without consumption: the share of aware non-consumers ranges from just 3 percent for Mais Sponcio to 19 percent for dandelion. That spread is precisely the empirical justification for separating the two transitions, since a product can be widely known yet rarely eaten.

After accounting for missing covariate values, the models included 2,758 consumers, with eight non-binary respondents excluded owing to their small number. Demographic patterns emerged but proved product-specific rather than systematic. Women had significantly higher odds than men of being aware of dandelion (odds ratio 2.169) and caraway (1.509), yet among those already aware, women showed lower odds of consuming caraway (0.656) and red thistle (0.641). Age associations were similarly heterogeneous: older respondents had higher odds of awareness of dandelion and red thistle, while age was negatively associated with awareness of Mais Sponcio and, among aware respondents, with consumption of caraway and mountain spinach. Education mattered for some products, with high-school educated respondents showing lower awareness of Mais Sponcio and caraway than university graduates, but no consistent educational gradient ran across all five foods.

Geography produced one of the study’s more counterintuitive results. Compared with residents of central Italy, people living in the northeast had higher odds of awareness of Mais Sponcio (1.370) and dandelion (1.379), yet among aware respondents, northeast residence was associated with substantially lower odds of consuming Mais Sponcio (0.327), mountain spinach (0.556) and red thistle (0.504). Meanwhile, the SNAI classification of inner-area municipalities showed no significant associations with either transition, suggesting that where a person lives, once other characteristics are controlled for, matters less than how often that person physically enters mountain territory.

That territorial exposure was the most consistent pattern in the entire analysis. Respondents who rarely visit mountain areas had substantially lower odds of awareness of Mais Sponcio (0.259), dandelion (0.563), mountain spinach (0.343) and red thistle (0.483) compared with those visiting at least weekly, and infrequent visits were also negatively associated with consumption among the already aware, most sharply for mountain spinach (0.175) and red thistle (0.200). Motivation compounded the effect: food-and-wine tourism was positively and significantly associated with awareness of all five products, with odds ratios from 1.273 for mountain spinach to 1.585 for caraway, and with consumption among aware respondents for dandelion (1.576), caraway (1.787), mountain spinach (1.563) and red thistle (1.613), with a positive but only marginally significant association for Mais Sponcio. Outdoor activities and visits to relatives or friends also helped: for Mais Sponcio, selecting visits to relatives or friends as a motivation corresponded to 1.508 times the odds of awareness and 3.131 times the odds of consumption conditional on awareness.

Robustness checks reinforced rather than overturned these findings. Replacing the inner-area classification with an altimetric one left the main coefficients broadly stable, and an extended specification adding habitual consumption of related categories, ancient grains for Mais Sponcio and wild edible plants for the others, showed strong associations, most dramatically for dandelion, where habitual wild-plant consumption corresponded to roughly three times the odds of awareness (3.066) and more than eight times the odds of consumption among aware respondents (8.347). The authors retained the baseline as the preferred model because habitual consumption may be endogenous, but the extended specification fit better statistically. Model fit overall was modest: McFadden pseudo-R2 values ranged from 0.045 for caraway to 0.087 for Mais Sponcio, and ROC-AUC values ran from 0.619 to 0.690 for awareness and 0.677 to 0.767 for the consumption transition, indicating modest to moderate discriminatory ability that the authors themselves flag as a limitation.

The authors are explicit that, with cross-sectional data, these are associations rather than causal effects; people already interested in traditional foods may simply be the ones who visit mountains and join food tours, and reverse causality, for instance around visit frequency, cannot be fully excluded. Complementary descriptive evidence nonetheless points the same direction: on a seven-point agreement scale, respondents rated perceived higher quality (5.75), organoleptic characteristics (5.72) and natural characteristics (5.59) as the strongest motivations for buying mountain products. The practical upshot is a two-track segmentation logic. For a product like Mais Sponcio, where the bottleneck is visibility, the authors suggest retail promotion, food fairs, tastings and processed products suited to everyday urban consumption; for products that are known but under-eaten, such as dandelion, the levers are accessibility, culinary knowledge and integration into tourism and food-service experiences, including guided foraging excursions and themed menus on the Asiago and Cansiglio plateaus. Any demand-side push, they caution, must reckon with supply realities: Mais Sponcio is grown on only around 20 hectares, and wild plants raise seasonality, conservation and sustainable-harvesting constraints that marketing alone cannot solve.

Subject of Research: Consumer awareness and consumption of five traditional plant-based products from the mountains of northeastern Italy

Article Title: Old flavours, new choices: from awareness to consumption of traditional products of marginal mountain areas

Article References: Callegari, A., Gatto, P., Grilli, G., Shen, X., & Pagliacci, F. (2026). Old flavours, new choices: from awareness to consumption of traditional products of marginal mountain areas. Agricultural and Food Economics, 14(1), Article 78. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40100-026-00524-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40100-026-00524-4

Keywords: traditional food, mountain agriculture, consumer behaviour, food-and-wine tourism, Veneto, wild edible plants, Mais Sponcio, continuation-ratio logit, market segmentation, rural development, survey, Italy