Nutritional information and restaurant operators responsiveness

Introduction The imbalance or substantive nutrition intake is commonly associated with obesity which are believed contribute to chronic diseases and lessen the longevity (Gopalan, 1992, MOH, 2007). Large numbers of the world populations are reported of suffering heart diseases, hypertension, and diabetes because of the overweight (Schofield & Mullainathan, 2008) and six of the ten leading causes of death are related to nutrition components intakes (Dennison, Dennison & Frank, 1994). With these reasons, health conscious is received a greater concern among the consumers, individuals or family particularly dealing on the types of food they consumed either outside or meal prepared at home. The awareness not only given to appearance of the food products but also to the nutritional contents for packaged of food selling at the retail outlets. In other words, nutritional information is of the one crucial issue in the food service, food manufacturing and processing industry and therefore continuously received attention among the academics scholars. Compare to three industries, the nutritional information or labelling has long been a mandatory in food manufacturing and food process industries than those in food service industry and it sub-sectors (King, 2006; Ophardt, 2003). Many countries legislation are mandating the disclosure of nutrients information of the food products as means for consumers to aware of the nutritional properties and nutrients contents in foods like, calorie, protein, carbohydrate, fat, sugar and most of them must be regulated by laboratories accredited (McVety et al, 2001). Thomas & Mills (2008) argue that in restaurant industry, food and product information on menus are normally portraying something related to quantity, quality, price, brand names, product identification, points of origin, merchandising terms, visual presentation and food preparation. Restaurants operators put a lot of effort to display food preparation or methods of cooking like deep fried, smoked, prepared from scratch, roasted, steamed on menus to gives customers general idea and provide an estimate time on how long food will be served and would be presented. Drydale & Galipue (2008) however contends these basic information disclosures have relatively given minor impact on products perceptions and evaluations without helping customers to understands the contents of food they consumed unless nutritional information is provided (Consumer Affairs, 2008). In this present day, customers are believed to be more demanding beyond those practices and the provision of nutritional information on restaurant menu has been gaining popularity and the number of customers who are concerned on this issue are also increased (Thomas & Mills, 2008). The importance of nutritional information in the restaurant menu begins to catch attention among the academic scholars’ (Burton and Creyer, 2004; Thomas & Mills, 2006; Thomas and Mills, 2008; Basset et. al, 2007; Hwang & Lorenzen (2008). However, most of the available studies were undertaken in the developed countries with scarce looking at Malaysian restaurant contextually setting. Result of the recent study in the Malaysia context revealed there is an awaking of nutritional awareness among the Malaysian restaurant customers (Mohd Zahari, Din & Shariff, 2010). Majority of restaurant customers positively perceived the important of providing nutritional information in the full service restaurant menu. Despite this, the extent of willingness, constraints and obstacles of restaurant operators in providing the nutritional information in restaurant menu have not been widely explored. With this gap, this study empirically investigates; a). restaurant operators responsiveness towards providing nutritional information and b). the constraints and