Evgenia Karamouzi

Functional foods are products that have clinically evidenced health benefits for consumers due to one or more of their ingredients. While research indicates that consumers are highly interested in these products and are often willing to pay premium prices to buy them, stories of market failure are frequent for the specific category. Hence, a critical question is what determines consumers’ willingness to purchase functional food products. A hypothesis confirmed by many studies is that health concerns are positively associated with purchasing intentions. Nevertheless, other factors may also positively or negatively affect consumers’ willingness to buy functional foods. Our work examines this contention by focusing on a novel functional food product: yogurt enriched with sea buckthorn. The product, which is developing in the framework of an ongoing project, is expected to combine the health benefits of yogurt with the medicinal properties of sea buckthorn.

Hippophae (sea buckthorn) is a plant valued for its berries in food manufacturing and medicinal properties. Despite growing research on its benefits, consumer perceptions of sea buckthorn-based products remain underexplored. This study examines Greek consumers’ attitudes toward cereal bars enriched with sea buckthorn, developed within a project focused on high-nutritional-value foods. Key factors include awareness, taste, safety, health benefits, trust, convenience, price, appearance, quality certification, environmental friendliness, and support for small-scale farmers. Results show moderate willingness to buy due to perceived health benefits and sustainability, but marketing should address sensory profile and trust to build a robust market.

Sea buckthorn berries (Hippophaë rhamnoides L.) (SB) are considered as a fruit with a high nutritional value with a plethora of bioactive ingredients. The present work focusses on the analysis of the whole NMR metabolic profile of SB berries grown in an organic orchard of Meteora/Greece. In parallel, this study validates/highlights qualitative characteristics of the osmotic processed berries according to the fresh fruit. The composition in bioactive metabolites of SB berries was elucidated through sophisticated high-resolution NMR spectroscopy. The lipophilic profile maintains the vitamins, flavonoid glycosides, phenolic esters and the essential lipid components of SB, while the polar profile reveals a variety of flavonoids, saccharides, organic acids, amino acids and esterified glycosides. This approach towards identification of SB bioactive ingredients may serve as basis for simultaneous profiling and quality assessment and may be applied to monitor fresh food quality regarding other food preservation methods.