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

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-of-package 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.

Automated summary

The research shows that sugar teaspoon labels on product packaging are more effective in helping consumers make healthier choices compared to traffic-light labels, especially for food categories with simpler ingredients. Processing fluency is proposed as the mechanism for the relation between sugar signals and product choices.