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PurposeWhile coping with severe damages of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak worldwide, this study enlightens the potential effects of the pandemic on young adults' willingness to avoid game meat consumption as well as to purchase animal welfare products.Design/methodology/approachIn a structural equation model (N = 234), food safety concerns and perceived responsibility for a future change of individuals, marketers and the government as predictors are related to behavioral intentions. Further, two antecedents of food safety concern including risk perception and anxiety related to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are tested.FindingsUsing a Chinese sample, results indicated that food safety concern – triggered by risk perception and anxiety – negatively affected willingness to buy animal welfare products. Perceived responsibility of marketers' change positively relates to people's willingness to avoid game meat and to buy animal welfare products, while the latter is also positively related to perceived governmental responsibility.Practical implicationsConsumers demand marketers to improve safety and hygiene standards as it is a necessary condition for adopting sustainable consumption behaviors. Animal welfare products have the potential to pronounce the demanded level of product safety, while the game meat market needs to be prepared for necessary adaptations for coping with the adverse effects of COVID-19.Originality/valueThis article adds knowledge to the behavioral consequences of a viral hazard in the context of sustainable food choices while relating those to attribution theories and food safety concerns.

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This research aims to investigate the potential of consumer empowerment, the activation of consumers’ perceived power over companies, to achieve improved advertising effects for organic food compared to only communicating ecological benefits (classical green appeals). Two online experiments were conducted to analyze the ad effectiveness for consumers’ responses including their evaluations of the company and purchase intentions (nStudy1 = 294; nStudy2 = 457). Results indicate that green empowerment ads reach overall better performance to increase people’s perceived customer orientation and purchase intentions compared to green appeals, while similar effects are identified for perceived corporate environmental responsibility. Empowerment tactics are especially effective when consumers perceive the supplier to be a larger, high-resource company compared to a smaller, low-resource one. The significant effects of perceived corporate resources also indicates that smaller companies should use differentiated ad strategies depending on if they intend to enhance consumers’ purchase intentions or their environmental reputation.