SummaryA proliferation of processed food and labeling claims motivated the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, which mandated the Nutrition Facts Label. Providing nutrition information is often put forth as a way to change food choice; however, despite efforts to provide dietary information using nutrition labeling, more than a third of the US has obesity and portions of the population continue to under consume vital nutrients. There has been progress beyond the Nutrition Facts Label in recent years with front‐of‐package labeling and menu labeling, which is crucial given changes in consumption trends for food‐away‐from‐home. Additionally, changes were recently made to the Nutrition Facts Label due to lack of awareness, understanding, and ability to effectively improve diet quality. This paper explores the literature to track the evolution of knowledge about attention to nutrition information and how nutrition information affects dietary choices.

No abstract

The promise of novel plant-based meat alternatives (PBMAs) to lessen the health and environmental impacts of meat consumption ultimately depend on market acceptance and the extent to which they displace meat in consumers’ diets. We use household scanner data to provide an in-depth analysis of consumers’ PBMA buying behaviors. PBMAs buyers tend to be young, single, female, college educated, employed, higher income, and non-white. About 20% of consumers purchased a PBMA at least once, and 12% purchased a PBMA on multiple occasions. About 2.79% of households only purchased PBMAs. About 86% of PBMA buyers also bought ground meat; however, PBMA buyers spent about 13% less on ground meat. Interestingly, after a household’s first PBMA purchase, ground meat consumption did not fall. The number of households buying a PBMA for the first time fell over the two year period studied, despite the increase in market share in the ground meat market.

This study explores the effects of consumers’ beliefs about labels on chicken. We elicit beliefs associated with seven different labels. By varying the presence/absence of labels in a choice experiment, we are able to determine the effects of labels on consumer choices and decompose the value of labels into beliefs and base utility. Health perceptions have the largest positive effect, and impacts of animal welfare vary by information treatment. We explore the convergent validity of our approach by comparing individual’s beliefs to responses to a best-worst scaling question, which were weakly correlated, suggesting the two approaches are measuring different constructs.

This article examines the current state of food safety preparedness and response in three representative countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): Kenya, Senegal and South Africa. We focus on foodborne diseases associated with the microbial contamination of animal-sourced foods. The results of our analysis indicate that governments in all three countries have official programmes to limit foodborne diseases and mitigate the effects of outbreaks. However, the population in these three countries continues to experience a high burden of foodborne diseases, and knowledge of the specific causes and mitigation of these diseases in SSA is lacking. Furthermore, there is a need for more and better food safety education programming, as we found no study that has collected a representative sample to estimate the level of public awareness of foodborne pathogens in any of the three countries studied. Evidence also suggests that institutional capacity around food safety in both the public and private sectors is insufficient due to limited financial investment and technical capacity. We end by providing suggestions for improving food safety preparedness and response in the region.