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Movement Control Order (MCO). During MCO, a series of enforcement measures carried out by the
government included closing all government and private premises except for those essential services
and announced travel bans on foreigners entering Malaysia and on Malaysians leaving the country,
even the restriction of movement within the country. All of these business sectors such as the primary
sector, secondary sector and tertiary sector have been threatened by this pandemic.
On the other hand, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there was widespread panic among people.
Supply disruptions and the higher demand from customers stockpiling food, toilet paper, mask and
hand sanitizer cause the price of these essential products to increase substantially. It is unavoidable that
Restaurant Vegetarian S.I Jin Wei also faced the disruption of its raw material supply such as oil, raw
mushrooms and fried chicken powder. Raw material shortage will definitely affect the manufacturing.
The impacts from such disturbances may bring to high lead time, increase production cost, lower
production level and even increase the product selling price. Furthermore, the Consumer Price Index
(CPI) of food has increased faster than overall CPI in all regions of the world. Globally, food prices
increase faster than average inflation with the start of a pandemic. Therefore, the price of a customer
willing to pay for products and services depends on its utility. The total utility is defined as the
aggregate amount of satisfaction gained by customers through the consumption of products or services.
Total utility is associated with acquisition utility and transaction utility in consumption choice.
Acquisition utility can be obtained by acquiring the product’s need satisfying attributes at a given price.
Meanwhile, transaction utility is the payoff of customers derived from realization that the purchase
price is less than their reference price. Under stockout situations in which consumers "have to" buy the
product, they derive both acquisition utility and transaction utility from the purchase. When they have
the option to wait (non-stockout), however, the emphasis placed on the acquisition utility will be lower,
because they don't need to buy the product right away. In other words, the consumer's transaction utility
under stockout conditions will be less than under non-stockout conditions.

 2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW

Literature review consists of frozen food, reference price and customer purchase intention.

2.1.1 FROZEN FOOD

Frozen food and ready to cook food markets have been rapidly expanding and show significant growth
in the market share. It comes from foods related to fish, meat, vegetables, seafood as well as snacks.
Frozen snacks based products can refer to both fish and meat based snacks or vegetable based snacks
including chicken nuggets, meatball, fish ball, fish cakes and spring roll (Arifeen, 2012). According to
the NFRA, consumers nowadays have changed their perception regarding frozen food. Due to the
busy and hectic lifestyle, people are lacking time to prepare their food by themselves. That’s why
consumers’ eating habits are different compared to previous times and they realized the value and
convenience of frozen food for every meal occasion. Food preparation decisions are totally influenced
by the homemaker's time. The factors such as individuals’ time, energy in acquisition, consumption
and disposal must align with the conveniences and food consumption method. People appreciated the
time saving advantages of frozen processed food.
Increasing the use of frozen food trends supported by the dietary consumption which has
transformed from home-cooked to the use of frozen food brings to the growth of the frozen food
industry (Euromonitor International, 2014). Restaurant Vegetarian S.I Jin Wei also took this
opportunity by investing in the frozen food industry and launched their own brand’ frozen vegetable
snacks based products such as Crispy Oyster Mushroom and Mushroom Chop. The brand name is
“Sweet Igloo”. The ingredients for these products are fully free of animal products, no egg and no milk
as it could be consumed by vegetarians and vegans too. Besides, the manufacturer only adopts the high
quality and fresh raw mushrooms even the fast freeze technology in order to ensure

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