But it was supposed to be healthy! How expected and actual nutritional value affect the content and linguistic characteristics of online reviews for food products

Abstract Consumers are choosing to purchase food products from retailers through online channels rather than brick‐and‐mortar channels. While online reviews play a crucial role in influencing online purchases, scant work has examined how consumers write reviews for food products. We argue that the nutritional value of the food is a key aspect of product performance and apply expectation‐disconfirmation theory to examine whether pre‐purchase expectations about a food product's nutritional value and disconfirmation of these expectations have a significant effect on online review content and linguistic characteristics. Using text‐mining approaches to analyze Amazon data, we find that pre‐purchase expectations, postpurchase performance, and disconfirmation regarding nutritional value affect both review content and linguistic characteristics, including review length, diversity, readability, subjectivity, and sentiment. While research suggests that postpurchase product performance is the main influence on online review writing behavior, this research shows that the pre‐purchase phase also plays a key role.