Consumer and Strategic Firm Response to Nutrition Shelf Labels

The display of nutrition facts is mandatory on virtually all packaged foods sold in the United States. Yet manufacturers and retailers add their own claims to differentiate their products and capture consumers' attention at point of sale. We implement experimental nutrition claims on shelf labels in a retail setting and test how consumers react to the display of these labels that express information reported on the Nutrition Facts Panel in a different format. We hypothesize that our labels either shift demand for the highlighted healthier products uniformly or trigger more complex demand rotations. Our estimated heterogeneous labeling effects suggest that consumers process nutrition information differently depending on which and how many claims are displayed and prefer products labeled with a single claim overall. When we simultaneously consider demand and supply responses under three price setting behaviors (competitive pricing, Bertrand-Nash pricing, and monopoly pricing), we find that consumer surplus and overall welfare is highest when our labels display multiple nutrient claims and retailers are able to adjust prices across the entire product category. Firms' profits are highest when single nutrient claims are displayed, however. We conclude that firms with market power have little incentive to voluntarily display nutrition claims that maximize welfare.