The impact of front-of-pack nutrition labels on consumer product evaluation and choice: an experimental study

Abstract

Objective: The present research was an experimental test that aimed to quantify the impact of two dominant front-of-pack (FOP) nutritional label formats on consumer evaluations of food products that carried them. The two FOP label types tested were the traffic light label and the Percentage Daily Intake. Design: A 4 × 5 partially replicated Latin square design was used that allowed the impact of the FOP labels to be isolated from the effects of the product and the consumers who were performing the evaluations. Setting: The experiment was conducted on campus at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Subjects: The participants were 250 university students selected at random who met qualifying criteria of independent living and regular purchase of the products used in the research. They were not aware of the purpose of the research. Results: The presence of FOP labels led to significant and positive changes in consumer purchase intentions towards the products that carried them. These changes were not affected by the nature of FOP labels used, their size or the product nutritional status (good/bad) that they were reporting. Conclusions: The result is consistent with the participants paying attention to the FOP label and then using it as an adimensional cue indicating product desirability. As such, it represents a complete functional failure of both of these FOP label types in this specific instance. This result supports calls for further research on the performance of these FOP labels before any move to compulsory deployment is made.

A survey of consumer attitude towards nutrition and health statements on food labels in South Australia

“…While many studies have examined consumer comprehension and preference regarding front-of-pack nutrition labels [eg 1, 2, 3, 5], few studies have examined the impact on behaviour. One study conducted on university students in New Zealand [14] found that each of the front-of-pack labels tested led to significantly positive changes in purchase intention regardless of label type, size, or the nutritional quality of the food product carrying the label. A later study conducted in New Zealand on consumers recruited on exit from supermarkets by the same investigators [15] found that a HSR label decreased intention to purchase regardless of whether the product carried 5 stars or 2 stars.…”

Consumers' responses to front-of-pack labels that vary by interpretive content

“…The DIG is 43 known as a reductive FoPL because it does not provide an assessment of a product's 44 nutritional quality (Hamlin, McNeill, & Moore, 2014;Newman, Howlett, & Burton, 2014). 45 Evaluative FoPLs, on the other hand, provide an interpretation of the levels of nutrients 46 within a product (e.g., through colour and text).…”

The impact of front-of-pack marketing attributes versus nutrition and health information on parents' food choices

“…This research contributes to the discourse on policy-related influences on food choice with respect to government regulated labelling (e.g., Feunekes et al 2008;Hamlin et al, 2015;Pettigrew et al 2017;van Herpen & van Trijp, 2011), plus it addresses an important research gap by intersecting this line of research with previous works on product-related predictors and parents' individual decision-making (Symmank et al, 2017). Taken M A N U S C R I P T …”

“…numerical information on key nutrients) and reductive (i.e. a summary assessment of the food's health value) elements (Hamlin, McNeill, & Moore, 2015) in the form of a visual star rating (from ½ to five stars) and summary nutrient facts panel. This panel information contains the amount of four 'risk' nutrients (energy, sugar, saturated fat and sodium) and one positive nutrient (e.g., dietary fiber or protein per 100g) (Department of Health, 2015).…”