Abstract
Abstract Achieving responsible consumption and sustainable development depends not only on regulatory frameworks and production-side reforms, but also on how sustainability is enacted through individual food choice decisions. Food consumption is particularly important, as it links sustainability objectives with repeated household practices in rapidly transforming economies. However, limited evidence exists on how perception-level mechanisms translate sustainability-oriented values into attitudes, purchase intention, and responsible food-related behaviour. This study develops and tests a perception-level VAB–MEC model showing how laddered consumer meanings are translated into measurable attitude, intention, and self-reported responsible food consumption pathways. A two-stage mixed-method design was implemented across Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Study 1 employed soft-laddering interviews with 33 adults (11 per country), purposively recruited from veg-friendly consumption settings. Study 2 used a cross-sectional survey of 604 respondents, analysed using PLS-SEM, measurement invariance testing, multi-group analysis, and CB-SEM robustness checks. The findings show that perceived health benefits, anticipated emotional reward, and perceived value congruence are consistently associated with favourable attitudes, while perceived environmental benefits play a more context-dependent role. Attitudes are strongly associated with purchase intention, which in turn is positively associated with self-reported responsible food consumption behaviour at the pre-purchase and purchase stages, rather than the full consumption lifecycle.