ESSENCE OF GROWING HEALTH FOOD MARKETS IN ASIAN COUNTRIES

Abstract

So-called health food has attracted attention for more than two decades, since its market has been steadily expanding. However, there are no world-wide studies on relationships between the health food market and the economic or social situations. This is because the definitions and regulations about health food differ from one country to another, so that it is difficult to compare various countries at once. We focused on Asia, since several Asian countries have established the rules and regulations of health food to date, and this area contains various countries in terms of economic situations. We executed multiple regression analysis, in which the per-capita health food expenditure and other six variables were respectively set as the objective variable and the explanatory variable candidates. As a result, it turned out that we can estimate the per-capita health food expenditure with considerable accuracy by using only two explanatory variables: the per-capita GDP and the population aging rate. The regression function obtained in this research enables us to quantitatively predict the health food market size. This can greatly contribute to making a global marketing strategy of health food.