Understanding the motivational antecedents for adopting a cooking app

In the last years, there has been an increasing interest in using technology to promote human-food activities, especially home-cooking. Cooking is one of the most effective ways of fighting the obesity epidemic and stimulating a healthy lifestyle. However, many have been the cooking apps that were designed to leverage healthy eating but not necessarily succeeded. One of the reasons is that there is a dearth of accurate, comprehensive, systematic and up-to-date information about digitally-mediated at-home meal consumption. Thus, we conducted a survey to decode the motivational antecedents that users value the most when adopting a cooking app. Among the 567 Portuguese participants, from 18 to 45 years-old, 75% reported a likelihood higher than 50% of adopting a cooking app. When questioned about their motivations, participants identified four distinct motivational antecedents, that altogether explained 54% of the variance for adopting a cooking app: 1) online community sharing, 2) meal-preparation and planning, 3) information about healthy eating and 4) professional advice (e.g., chefs or nutritionists). Learning about the features that users value, their motivations and preferences, will help to better design digital apps and will promote a more accurate and successful adoption behavior of a cooking app.