Prioritizing dining experience topics and their impacts on customer satisfaction under the moderating effect of consumption rituals

Foodservice firms recognize that products alone can no longer satisfy customer expectations. This study has two main objectives. First, it explores the priority of dining experience topics based on three dimensions: degree of attention, topic performance, and degree of impact. Second, it examines how consumption rituals moderate the relationship between dining experience topics and customer satisfaction. Drawing on 90,089 online reviews of Haidilao, this study adopts text mining for empirical analysis. The results yield the following priority ranking from highest to lowest: waitstaff, safety concerns, service facilities, corporate image, time cost, taste, price, waiting service, dining environment, family-friendly services, ingredients, and consumption rituals. The consumption rituals analyzed in this study showed only limited direct effects on customer satisfaction but played a more salient moderating role. Consumption rituals amplify the influences of factors such as waitstaff, dining environment, taste, family-friendly services, and ingredients, while attenuating the impacts of safety concerns, time cost, and price. These results provide actionable implications for restaurants to rationalize resource allocation and optimize operational strategies.