Decoding Consumer Perspectives on Homemade Food Delivery Platforms in Emerging Economies: Insights from Latent Dirichlet Allocation of User-Generated Content

Abstract

Despite the potential to empower home chef, facilitate access to traditional homemade foods, and contribute to more inclusive and culturally embedded food consumption, online food delivery platforms for homemade foods remain in their nascent stage and have received limited scholarly attention, particularly in emerging economies such as India. This study investigates the factors underlying the nascent development of online homemade food platforms and their implications for sustainable digital platform development. Qualitative research design comprises of thematic and sentiment analysis was employed. Thematic and sentiment analyses were conducted on 2,351 consumer reviews collected from websites and mobile applications of homemade food platform in India, using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation technique and six topic or theme is generated. Sentiment analysis is done on each generated theme. Topic 1such as love, like, enjoy, happy, frustrated, angry, disappointed, hate, satisfied value shows a high positive sentiment (80.16%) and high frequency of occurrence (88.9%). Topic 2  such as taste, convenience, efficiency, delivery, schedule, useful, discount, offer, promotion, app, platform, website, technology, interface, automation, digital, online second highest frequency of occurrence (84.07%) and comparatively low positive sentiment (70.92%). Remaining theme shows low to moderate frequency and medium sentiment. The findings suggest that to develop sustainable digital platform for homemade food, platform first address fundamental themes included in topic 2 and subsequently enhance themes included in topic 1 to encourage sustained consumer engagement. By identifying the value conditions underlying consumer adoption, the study contributes to understanding how sustainable digital platforms can develop in homemade-food ecosystems while creating opportunities for home chef and preserving socially and culturally embedded food practices.