The effect of front‐of‐package nutrition labels on the choice of low sugar products

Abstract

Policy makers around the world are facing serious challenges in controlling citizens' obesity and healthiness, hence, they devote increased attention to the development of tools that communicate easily processable nutrition information. Front-ofpackage nutrition labels are one of such tools and have been used to signal the extent to which food items contain potentially unhealthy ingredients such as sugar or fat. In this research, we focus on sugar cues on three different food categories to investigate their impact on consumer choice. We compare two labels, one already used (traffic-light) and one never used (sugar teaspoon): sugar teaspoons prove to be more effective than the previously used traffic-lights in healthy product choices, but only for specific food categories. In two experiments, we find that sugar teaspoon labels indicating sugar content, as opposed to traffic-light labels, are more effective in signaling sugar levels and thus, in helping consumers making healthier choices. We find that this is particularly relevant for food categories that have a simpler ingredient composition (i.e., whose healthiness relies more heavily on sugar).We finally propose processing fluency as the mechanism for the relation between sugar signals and product choices.

Evaluation of Food Labelling the Products with Information Regarding the Level of Sugar: A Preliminary Study

“…Therefore, appropriate labelling can be/become an adequate tool to implement and evaluate actions aimed at reducing sugar consumption [55]. The literature indicates that, with respect to the sugar content of foods, in addition to the commonly consumer-recognized means of labelling foods, other methods of labelling are also proposed to allow the consumer to better estimate or understand how much sugar is in a food product, e.g., indicating the amount of sugar in teaspoons, which, as a result, may contribute to the likelihood of purchasing decisions that are more rational from a health perspective [62].…”

More innovative but less socially responsible: The influence of using metaphors in marketing communications on product perception, choice, and adoption intention

“…The difficulty associated with processing stimuli affects people's evaluations of those stimuli, as suggested by processing fluency theory (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009; Oppenheimer, 2008; Reber & Unkelbach, 2010; Schwarz, 2004). For instance, prior research has shown that the difficulty associated with processing marketing stimuli such as advertising cues (Coulter & Suri, 2020), packaging (Mauri et al, 2021), fonts (Wu et al, 2021), and logos (Luffarelli, Mukesh, et al, 2019; Mahmood et al, 2019; Miceli et al, 2014) influences the attitudes and purchase intentions of consumers. We leverage this theory to predict how metaphors, which are cognitively demanding to process, influence product perceptions, choice, and adoption intentions.…”

Exploring the effects of added sugar labels on food purchasing behaviour in Australian parents: An online randomised controlled trial

“…Two real-world 4-week RCTs used smartphone apps to enable study participants to scan product barcodes to receive interpretive or non-interpretive nutrition labels in Australia [ 30 ] and in New Zealand [ 31 ] and found no effect on healthiness of food purchases in any food category compared to control NIP condition. A recent online RCT with European adults aged 18 to 34 years found an interaction of food label and product category on probability of selecting low, medium, and high sugar products when comparing a traffic light label to pictures of numbers of teaspoons across smoothies, yoghurts and ready-meals categories [ 32 ]. This aligns with our study, where some labels improved the healthiness of choices in the beverage category but worsened the healthiness of yoghurt and breakfast cereal choices.…”