OPTIMUM: Jurnal Ekonomi dan Pembangunan VOL 11, No. 2, 204-211 https://dx.doi.org/10.12928/optimum.v11i2.4652 204 Lycopene Rich Drink: Consumers Acceptance and Purchase Intention in Malaysia Rawaida Rusli 1,a ; Siti ‘Aisyah Baharudin 2,b* ; Nur Fazliana Md.Noh 3,c ; Mohamad Nazim Anvarali 4,d ; Hadijah Hassan 5,e 1 rawaida@mardi.gov.my; 2 sab16@usm.my; 3 fazliana@mardi.gov.my; 4 nazim@mardi.gov.my; 5 hadijah@mardi.gov.my a, c, d, e Malaysia Agricultural Research Development Institute; b Universiti Sains Malaysia *corresponding authors Introduction Rich Drink is one of the categories in the functional beverages. Functional beverage had gained attention nowadays for the additional benefit offered (Sahar et al., 2019). The term ‘functional food’ emerged from Japan in 1993 when Japan started to explores the boundary between food and medicine (Henry, 2010; Siro et al., 2008; Hardy, 2000; Kwak & Jukes, 2001 and Stanton et al., 2005). Functional food had a great potential to be incorporated with desirable nutritional ingredients and bioactive compounds such as vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fatty acids, fiber, prebiotics, and probiotics (Zaidel et al., 2021). Chang, Ma, & Chen (2020) define ‘functional beverages’ contain additives to reduce blood lipids, reduce fat absorption, aid digestion and many other body functions. Functional beverages are emerging markets due to the new functional beverages added and ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history Received : 10-08-2021 Revised : 18-09-2021 Accepted : 21-09-2021 This study had been carried out to assess the level of consumers’ acceptance and purchase intention towards new functional beverages developed by the Malaysia Agricultural Research Development Institute (MARDI). The Lycopene Rich Drink (LRD) had been assessed towards 400 respondents in 4 Zone in Malaysia which is Northern, Southern, Western, and Eastern using stratified sampling. The results revealed that the consumers had well accepted the LRD based on the highest mean score acceptance (mean=4.16) compared to the commercial (mean=3.15) beverages in the market. Taste and color are the most preferred attributes that influenced the purchase intention. The logistic regression analysis had predicted almost 95% of the respondents' intent to purchase. Marital status and number of households are the sociodemographic factors that show a significant relationship based on the Chi-Square analysis. The findings of this study are beneficial for the beverages industry players towards exploiting the opportunity of health additional benefit offered. This is an open access article under the CC–BY-SA license. Keywords Consumers Acceptance Functional Beverages Lycopene Rich Drink MARDI Purchase Intention