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VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: EVIDENCE FROM

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 The Tourism and Hospitality Management Interational Conference 2025

VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: EVIDENCE

FROM TRIPADVISOR

Sofiya Dengub1, Halimin Herjanto1* and James Ryerson1

1
Marymount University, Arlington, VA, U.S.A
*
Corresponding Author: hherjant@[Link]

Extended Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed people’s behavior, fostering better and
healthier lifestyles. This pandemic has encouraged people around the world to take a moment and
reconsider their health as their main invaluable assets that need to be maintained carefully. As a result,
globally, people are found to be more physically active (Trinity College Dublin, 2020) and eat healthier
foods (Eastlake, 2024). This trend has driven people around the world to become vegetarian
(VeganSociety, 2022), and consequently, the global vegan food market size is projected to reach $103
billion (USD) in 2032 (Fortune Business Insight, 2025). Basu (2022) suggests that these staggering
dollar values encourage restaurant businesses to tap into this market by offering more innovative menus
and investing in new vegetarian restaurants.
Despite this positive outlook, Yule (2024) argues that restaurant businesses, specifically
vegetarian restaurants, are notoriously competitive and vulnerable. According to Albanes-Davis (2024),
severe competition is responsible for 30% of restaurant survival, and he predicted that the survival rate
for vegetarian restaurants is much lower. One of the reasons for this vulnerability is the countless
number of vegetarian restaurants available, which results in a smaller market share for each vegetarian
restaurant (IBISWorld, 2024). Adding to this complexity, Yule (2024) suggests that the current
economic situation and feminized vegans are also responsible for this decline.
Because of these challenges, Wilyanto et al. (2023) suggest that vegetarian restaurant operators
need to be creative in presenting and marketing their products. In search of such creativity, tourism and
hospitality scholars have intensively investigated vegetarian restaurant customers' satisfaction criteria.
These studies found that customer dimensions such as psychological factors (Park et al., 2022; Ahn,
2024) and cognitive factors (Wang, 2022; Oh et al., 2021), restaurant factors (Nguyen et al., 2020; Ahn,
2024) among others are responsible for vegetarian restaurant customer satisfaction. There is no doubt
that these findings lay a good foundation for understanding such a phenomenon.

Keywords: Vegetarian Restaurants, Customer Satisfaction, and Thematic Analysis.

Purpose/Problem Statement
Despite the rapid growth in the popularity of vegetarian foods, many restaurants remain
challenged in meeting customers’ expectations and providing a satisfactory dining experience. As
previously investigated by several tourism and hospitality scholars, the vegetarian restaurant
satisfaction criteria are complex and multi-dimensional. Despite this effort, the authors notice that
existing taxonomies are fragmented and focused on specific dimensions of customer satisfaction. The
lack of comprehensive taxonomy focusing on vegetarian restaurant customer satisfaction may provide
inaccurate information that leads to incorrect and mismatched strategies. Thus, this study aims to extend
the current literature by providing a more holistic taxonomy that specifically relates to vegetarian
restaurant customer satisfaction.

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Originality/value
This study is unique for two reasons. First, it focuses on exploring global vegetarian restaurant
customer satisfaction post the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, using the thematic analysis approach, this
study only includes literature that was published in the Scopus index after the year 2000. This time
frame is selected to ensure that the findings include both existing and new satisfaction factors that are
influenced by COVID-19.

Design/methodology/approach
Following Adiwijaya et al.’s (2024) deductive thematic analysis procedure, this study began its
procedure by finding relevant academic literature on Google Scholar. Google Scholar helps researchers
find relevant literature from various disciplines (Zakiyyah et al., 2022) relatively quickly (Ramadhan
& Haedar, 2023). To ensure accuracy in identifying the existing themes of vegetarian restaurant
customer satisfaction, the authors used several keywords such as vegetarian restaurants, vegan
restaurants, and customer satisfaction. Additionally, only articles published in Scopus-indexed journals
from 2020 were included to reflect post-COVID-19 satisfaction criteria and to ensure information
quality. After assessing their abstract, 14 articles were entered to determine the themes of vegetarian
restaurant customer satisfaction.

Findings/Discussion
This study found that the vegetarian restaurant customer satisfaction taxonomy includes 19 key
attributes that are categorized into five important dimensions. The first dimension is food related. This
dimension consists of attributes such as food taste, quality, menu variety, presentation, attractiveness,
and freshness. The second dimension is the service dimension, which relates to staff quality. This
includes staff attitude, interactions, and knowledge. The third dimension is the restaurant's physical
dimension, which includes ambiance, décor, seating, and accessibility. The fourth dimension is the
value dimension. This includes sustainability, health and beauty values, social and ethics, and cultural
and religious values. Finally, the psychological dimension includes beliefs and emotions. The table
below presents brief information on these dimensions.
Table 1. Five Dimensions of Vegetarian Restaurant Customer Satisfaction Taxonomy
Key factors Countries Authors
Food (food taste, quality, Observed in the UK;
Bai et al. (2023); Mehrbakhsh et al. (2021);
menu variety, Thailand; Germany; Hong
Dinh et al. (2023); Badu-Baiden et al.
presentation, Kong; India; Global
(2022); Hanić et al. (2024); Ray, Das & She
attractiveness, and
(2023); Amorim, Laurindo & Sobral (2022);
freshness)
Mathayomchan & Taecharungroj (2020)
Service (staff attitude, Observed in the UK;
interactions, and Thailand Bai et al. (2023); Mehrbakhsh et al. (2021);
knowledge) Mathayomchan & Taecharungroj (2020)
Physical attributes Observed In the UK;
(ambiance, décor, Global
seating, and Bai et al. (2023); Hanić et al. (2024);
accessibility) Mathayomchan & Taecharungroj (2020)
Value (sustainability, Observed in Thailand;
Mehrbakhsh et al. (2021); Dinh et al.
health and beauty values, Germany; Hong Kong;
(2023); Badu-Baiden et al. (2022); Yu et al.
social and ethics, and South Korea; India;
(2024); Park, J., Park, Y., & Yu, J.
cultural and religious Global
(2022); Ray, Das & She (2023); Amorim,
values)
Laurindo & Sobral (2022)

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Psychological Observed in South Korea;

attributes (beliefs and China; Global Park, J., Park, Y., & Yu, J. (2022); Amorim,
emotions) Laurindo & Sobral (2022); Wang (2022)

Theoretical implications
This study supported and extended the existing literature on vegetarian restaurant customer satisfaction
by identifying and analyzing the five most common influencing dimensions (food, service, physical,
value, and psychography). Furthermore, the present study was able to introduce 19 contributing factors
to customer satisfaction attributes (food taste, quality, menu variety, presentation, attractiveness, and
freshness, staff attitude, interactions, and knowledge, ambiance, décor, seating, and accessibility,
sustainability, health and beauty values, social and ethics, and cultural and religious values, beliefs and
emotions).

Practical implications
This study shows that to satisfy their customers, vegetarian restaurant operators are suggested to pay
attention and build their strategies related to these five dimensions. First, restaurants should
continuously maintain their creativity to find the best ingredients and offer unique and innovative menus
to attract their customers. Second, vegetarian restaurant operators are recommended to consistently and
continuously train their customers and encourage them to learn related information about the food (i.e.,
history, ingredients, origins, etc.) and surrounding environments (i.e., wet markets to buy ingredients,
other unique restaurants, etc.). Third, operators are also recommended to maintain and consistently
refresh their physical environment to maintain the attractiveness and newness of their premises. Fourth,
to build values, operators are advised to educate their customers about what they are doing to maintain
their values. For instance, they can show their contribution to the community (social and ethical) and
personal (health testimonials from other customers or nutritionists).

Research limitations
Like any empirical research, this study has several limitations. First, the article included to build
this theme is limited. Therefore, future researchers should expand their study scope by including more
literature. Second, this study only included articles from the year 2000 onward; future research should
include articles before the year 2000 to provide a bigger picture of how people's satisfaction criteria
have evolved. Lastly, we only included Scopus-indexed journals, which may provide limited insights.
Thus, future research should include journals that are published in other indexes such as ABDC and
WOS.

References:
Adiwijaya, M., Herjanto, H., & Gutierrez, G. (2024). Post-Covid 19 amusement park satisfaction
attributes. Indonesian Journal of Sustainability Accounting and Management, 8(2), 369–387.

Ahn, J. (2024). Individual characteristics linking cognitive, affective and conative mechanisms among
vegetarian restaurant customers. Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, 36(2), 374–
389.
Albanes-Davis, M. (2024, January 27). The real ‘bad vegan’. [Link]
real-bad-vegan

Amorim, A., Laurindo, J. B., & Sobral, P. J. A. (2022). On how people deal with industrialized and
non-industrialized food: A theoretical analysis. Frontiers in Nutrition, 9,
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Badu-Baiden, F., Kim, S. (S.), Ahn, S. W., Wong, A. K. F., & Agrusa, J. (2022). Analysis of vegan
restaurant diners’ hierarchical experience structure by examining a vegan food attribute–

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benefit–value–intention linkage. International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism

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