LAUSR

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the perceptions of food anti-consumption in fast growing markets within an emerging economy context of Turkey. Design/methodology/approach Recently posted customer comments, complaints and suggestions related to the selected fast-food chains were examined from the following domains: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Sikayetvar.com. These comments were reviewed, assessed and classified by four trained independent raters. After examining the comments one-by-one the raters arrived at the final (triangulated) decision regarding the comment’s category after an iterative process including cross-examination. Findings Reasons for fast-food avoidance were primarily linked to customers’ negative past experiences (experiential avoidance). Identity avoidance, moral avoidance and interactivity avoidance. Originality/value The paper adds to the anti-consumption literature by examining the food avoidance framework of Lee et al. (2009) in an emerging market context. New categories were identified for reasons of food avoidance which have not been identified before in the anti-consumption literature such as interactivity avoidance.