Page 128 - MARSIUM'21 COMP OF PAPER

CHAI JING MIN (2022)
■ 1.0 INTRODUCTION

Healthy snacks refer to the health people pursue in terms of snacks. In traditional thinking, snacks as supplementary food after three meals a
day, have never been valued, and they are often even regarded as affecting normal diets and harmful to health. In fact, due to the acceleration
of the pace of study, work and life, the meal time is getting shorter and shorter, and the nutritional intake is inevitably not comprehensive.
Adding some leisure snacks in time can supplement the lack of nutrition intake at the main meal. At the same time, it can also resist fatigue
and relieve stress. These good for health are call healthy snacks.
Besides that, snacks can be divided into original product snacks, initial processing snacks and deep processing snacks. Under normal
circumstances, original snacks and initial processed snacks are healthy snacks. There are many healthy snacks in daily life, such as milk, soy
products, nuts, fresh fruits and unprocessed natural dried fruits.
One Little C Enterprise was founded in 2019, and has established for healthy snack about 11 products, including favourites such as Freeze-
dried Fruits, Freeze-Dried Yogurt, Peanut Butter, Almond Date Balls and Snowflakes Crisps. The company’s main product is all made from
Freeze-dried technology. For example, like Freeze-dried Strawberry, Freeze-dried Banana, Freeze-dried Mango, Freeze-dried Peach and more.
Due to the Freeze-dried technology, the colour, fragrance, nutrients, appearance and shape of raw fresh food can be maintained to the maximum
extent. In addition, freeze-dried products can be stored at room temperature for more than 5 years without preservatives, because food is dried
under low temperature and oxygen, the original nutrients of the food are almost undamaged, so it is as nutritious as fresh food and the finished
product is light in weight and easy to carry and transport. It is an excellent food for processing tourism, leisure and convenience method.

1.1 Problem Statement
Common health risks for Malaysians are overweight, heart disease and diabetes. According to The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (Tackling
Obesity in ASEAN), Malaysia has the highest obesity in Southeast Asia. In countries with prevalence, the obesity rate of Malaysians is 13.3% and
the overweight population accounts for 38.5%.
With the acceleration of the pace of social life, snacks have become a popular product for consumers around the world. Besides that, the
continuous renewal of people’s healthy consumption concepts, the healthy snack market is also growing. A new study released by Polaris
Market Research shows that the global healthy snack market is expected to reach about $40.699 billion by 2026. Healthy snacks have become the
new favourite of consumption. Snacks containing high fibre, calcium, protein, whole grains, vitamins and minerals are increasingly favoured.
Consumers hope that healthy snacks can keep them weight, provide nutritional requirements and meet their health goals. In addition, snack
products such as sugar reduction, salt reduction and low fat have also attracted people’s attention.

In the case, the freeze-dried food is very new in the Malaysia healthy snack market and also One Little C Enterprise is a very new company
in Malaysia so this paper examines what factor will influence the consumer purchase intention. This research uses structural equation analysis
to analyse the characteristics of namely, brand awareness, brand association, perceived quality and brand loyalty on AHIBS students’ purchase
intention towards healthy snacks.

1.2 Research Objective
Objectives of this research are:
1. To identify whether brand awareness have a positive influence on consumers’ purchase intention towards healthy snacks.
2. To identify whether brand association have a positive influence on consumers’ purchase intention towards healthy snacks.
3. To identify whether perceived quality has a positive influence on consumers’ purchase intention towards healthy snacks.
4. To identify whether brand loyalty have a positive influence on consumers’ purchase intention towards healthy snacks.

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