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In-depth knowledge of sustainable food consumption behavior regarding university students, and especially the younger ones, reveals tendencies of the worlds’ sustainable future. This study aims to explore the sustainable food consumption behavior of the Generation Z cohort (18–23 years of age) that is studying at Greek universities and living away from home, and to segment them according to their behavior. Quantitative research was implemented with an online questionnaire, which resulted in a collection of 252 valid samples. The results revealed that the focus of sustainable food consumption behavior is limited to eating seasonal fruits and vegetables and purchasing regional food. Additionally, it identified two student segments based on sustainable food consumption behavior.

Understanding consumer needs should be a high-priority strategic objective in new product development (NPD). Despite their importance, however, NPD processes do not take full advantage of the consumer survey methodologies available. The authors investigate+ parents” preferences for three new functional children's snacks marketed in Greece. Using a very simple discrete choice experimental design, the authors aim (a) to provide an example of consumer research implementation in food-related NPD and to assess its marketing value, and (b) to evaluate the quality of the acquired consumer-related information for marketing decision-making in food consumer-led NPD processes against a number of criteria set in the relevant literature. “Functionality” is found to be a statistically significant attribute for all three children's snacks of the research design compared to other attributes such as flavor and price. Parents seem to perceive the functional snack alternative as offering greater utility as compared to its conventional (i.e., nonfunctional) counterpart. Overall, the authors conclude that, despite some inherent weaknesses, the advantage of the discrete choice methodology in connection with consumer-led food NPD lies in its ability to describe current consumer needs and desires realistically and to contribute to the optimization of existing products. [EconLit Classification: M310, C920, C930, D100]. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This work pursues the potential of extending “Industry 4.0” practices to farming toward achieving “Agriculture 4.0”. Our interest is in fruit harvesting, motivated by the problem of addressing the shortage of seasonal labor. In particular, here we present an integrated system architecture of an Autonomous Robot for Grape harvesting (ARG). The overall system consists of three interdependent units: (1) an aerial unit, (2) a remote-control unit and (3) the ARG ground unit. Special attention is paid to the ARG; the latter is designed and built to carry out three viticultural operations, namely harvest, green harvest and defoliation. We present an overview of the multi-purpose overall system, the specific design of each unit of the system and the integration of all subsystems. In addition, the fully sensory-based sensing system architecture and the underlying vision system are analyzed. Due to its modular design, the proposed system can be extended to a variety of different crops and/or orchards.

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