Many individuals willingly or unknowingly consume food products that have been implicated in recall announcements. Exposure to potentially contaminated food products puts people at risk for contracting foodborne disease. Given the serious health complications associated with foodborne disease, a new message-design approach was needed that compels and empowers at-risk individuals to take appropriate life-saving actions when food-related, public health crises become imminent. The IDEA protocol was put forth to improve how we instruct and motivate at-risk audiences to self-protect against foodborne disease during food contamination events (T. Sellnow & D. Sellnow, 2013). IDEA-modeled messages, relative to alternative messages, are predicted to address audience diversity and produce more accurate receiver perceptions, which in turn translate into more appropriate behavioral intentions. The IDEA model has not yet been adequately or appropriately tested, despite arguments to the contrary. This study advanced the IDEA model by presenting: (1) a rigorous tool that more appropriately tested hypotheses, (2) a visually-friendly conceptual diagram for depicting a path-analytic framework, (3) important guidelines that scholars should employ to examine the IDEA model’s utility, and (4) justification for theoretical grounding in Witte’s (1992a) extended parallel process model (EPPM) in addition to D. Kolb’s (1984) learning cycle model. Rather than relying on tests based on analysis of variance to test theory, the present message-testing study employed a regression-based approach that more appropriately tested the IDEA model hypotheses. My conditional process model efficiently integrated moderators and mediators into a single path-analytic framework. My unconditional process model excluded the two moderating factors and their interactions from the statistical framework. Both statistical models included six parallel mediating mechanisms and two behavioral intention measures. The results of this message-testing experiment demonstrated how regression-based approaches that incorporate moderation, mediation, moderated-mediation, and moderated-moderated mediation should be employed to test the IDEA protocol. I found that an IDEA message was not consistently superior to an alternative message. My results suggest that an IDEA-modeled message should be thoughtfully designed to prevent inappropriate outcomes among target audiences. Improved message-design approaches should be explored for motivating and empowering at-risk individuals to self-protect against foodborne disease during contamination events.