The aim of this study is to investigate older people’s perceptions, across eight European countries (the UK, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Italy), towards functional foods.

The repertory grid method was used to elicit reasons underlying preferences of five yoghurts with different functional properties and two conventional ones.

Familiarity was the key driver in products’ separation. For the Italian case, as well as the Spanish, Portuguese, Danish and Swedish the first principal axis could be interpreted as novel-common axis, whilst it was not in the UK, Germany and Poland.

Behavioural intention to buy functional yoghurts was more strongly predicted and moderated by single item perceived need (PN) than single item affective and/or cognitive attitude (AA, CA), even though PN, AA and CA could be consistently assessed within the same latent measure (in all countries but Denmark). Nevertheless, beliefs/attitudes towards a novel category of products such as functional foods may be reasonably keeping moving.

In this study, preference instructions pertaining to beneficial and imagery attributes, revealed idiosyncratic properties associated with functional yoghurts across eight European samples of older people.