Erica van Herpen

Front-of-pack nutrition labels. Their effect on attention and choices when consumers have varying goals and time constraints.

Although front-of-pack nutrition labeling can help consumers make healthier food choices, lack of attention to these labels limits their effectiveness. This study examines consumer attention to and use of three different nutrition labeling schemes (logo, multiple traffic-light label, and nutrition table) when they face different goals and resource constraints. To understand attention and processing of labels, various measures are used including self-reported use, recognition, and eye-tracking measures. Results of two experiments in different countries show that although consumers evaluate the nutrition table most positively, it receives little attention and does not stimulate healthy choices. Traffic-light labels and especially logos enhance healthy product choice, even when consumers are put under time pressure. Additionally, health goals of consumers increase attention to and use of nutrition labels, especially when these health goals concern specific nutrients.

Missing Food, Missing Data? A Critical Review of Global Food Losses and Food Waste Data

Food losses and food waste (FLW) have become a global concern in recent years and emerge as a priority in the global and national political agenda (e.g., with Target 12.3 in the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals). A good understanding of the availability and quality of global FLW data is a prerequisite for tracking progress on reduction targets, analyzing environmental impacts, and exploring mitigation strategies for FLW. There has been a growing body of literature on FLW quantification in the past years; however, significant challenges remain, such as data inconsistency and a narrow temporal, geographical, and food supply chain coverage. In this paper, we examined 202 publications which reported FLW data for 84 countries and 52 individual years from 1933 to 2014. We found that most existing publications are conducted for a few industrialized countries (e.g., the United Kingdom and the United States), and over half of them are based only on secondary data, which signals high uncertainties in the existing global FLW database. Despite these uncertainties, existing data indicate that per-capita food waste in the household increases with an increase of per-capita GDP. We believe that more consistent, in-depth, and primary-data-based studies, especially for emerging economies, are badly needed to better inform relevant policy on FLW reduction and environmental impacts mitigation.

The Potential Use of Visual Packaging Elements as Nudges

Regulators legislate businesses’ use of claims on product packaging by mostly focusing on textual claims and the extent to which they could potentially mislead consumers. Interpreting textual claims generally requires consumers to engage in extensive and deliberate processing (so-called type 2 processing in dual processing models in social psychology). In real life competitive choice settings, however, businesses preferably make use of colours and other visual elements to successfully attract consumers. In case this approach supports consumers in making healthier food decisions, it can be seen as a form of nudging, as this approach largely appeals to consumers’ reactive, intuitive modes of decision making (i.e., system 1 processing). Nevertheless, visuals may mislead consumers to a larger extent than textual claims in that they overpromise health benefits of consuming the product. In order to effectively regulate health claims in the EU, we claim that regulation has to devote attention to the regulation of pictorial claims. We will first illustrate such a mechanism and its potential for effective nudging on the example of health and nutrition claims in the EU. We will then investigate on the example of the differences between textual and pictorial claims whether the EU health claims regulation is effective in making sure that sales techniques of food companies are being regulated as effective nudging instead of misleading marketing tactics.

Country Differences in the History of Use of Health Claims and Symbols

Health-related claims and symbols are intended as aids to help consumers make informed and healthier food choices but they can also stimulate the food industry to develop food that goes hand in hand with a healthier lifestyle. In order to better understand the role that health claims and symbols currently have and in the future potentially can have, the objective of the CLYMBOL project (“Role of health-related claims and symbols in consumer behaviour”, Grant no 311963) is to investigate consumers’ understanding of health claims and symbols, and how they affect purchasing and consumption [1]. As part of this endeavour, it is important to understand the history of use of claims and symbols in Europe. What have consumers been exposed to and how were these health-related messages used and discussed among the public? In this study, we interviewed key stakeholders across Europe about how health claims have been regulated in their country, how health symbols have been and currently are being treated, what form of monitoring there is or should be and how both health claims and symbols have been debated in the public opinion. In 26 European Union (EU) Member States, opinions from 53 key informants from up to three different stakeholder groups were gathered: national food authorities, representatives of the food industry, and consumer organisations. While 14 Member States reported (at least partial) regulation of the use of health claims and/or symbols before the introduction of the EU Regulation (EC 1924/2006) on nutrition and health claims made on foods [2], mandatory reporting of use had only been in place in three EU Member States. A number of voluntary codes of practice for health claims and/or symbols (i.e. pre-approval or justification when challenged) was said to be in use in 15 Member States. There are only a few national databases on health claims and symbols available, the data for which is often incomplete. Only eight Member States reported having some form of database from which information about health claims and symbols could be extracted. The stakeholders interviewed expressed a strong interest in measuring the impact of health claims and symbols, particularly research into the effects on consumer behaviour (e.g. awareness and understanding, attitudes towards products carrying claims and symbols and purchase/consumption effects), public health (health outcomes and changes in national health status due to the introduction of claims and symbols on food products) and economic aspects including sales, return on investment and reputation measurements. Public debates were said to have evolved around the topics of consumer understanding of claims, acceptance as well as trust in the information presented but also the effects on vulnerable groups such as children and elderly consumers. Another field of debate was said to have been the question of the effectiveness of health claims and symbols. Lastly, stakeholders reported that public debates focussed mainly on the legislative aspects, i.e. how to apply the EU Regulation (No 1924/2006) with regards to wording issues, the evaluation process at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the status of various claims and the nutrient profile modelling to be introduced in Europe.

EU Health Claims: A Consumer Perspective

Health claims can inform consumers about important nutritional qualities of food products that would otherwise go unnoticed, and influence consumer choice. This chapter reviews consumer behaviour literature related to health claims, and discusses this in the context of the EU legislation. It addresses the influence of textual as well as pictorial health claims, how consumers form inferences based on health claims, and the potential influence of health claims on consumer motivation to choose healthful products. Consumer choice is argued to be based on the fit between inferred product benefits and the goals that are accessible at the moment of choice. This relates to the dual goal of the legislation on health claims, namely information transparency as well as consumer health motivation. The scientific insights from consumer studies are confronted with the current legislation on health claims. Important bottlenecks for reaching the objectives of the legislation are a lack of attention by policy makers to the non-textual information on product packaging, a lack of ability of health claims to increase consumer motivation by themselves, and difficulty of consumers in correctly understanding health claims.

Mood as a Moderator of Social Norm’s Influence: An Abstract

Social norms are an influential driver of consumers’ preferences in different domains of everyday life (Cialdini et al. 2006; Melnyk et al. 2009) and are extensively used in marketing campaigns, as well as in political and social campaigns. Consumers are exposed to social norm information when they are in a good and when they are in a bad mood. The impact of mood on the effectiveness of persuasive messages is considerable (Bless et al. 1990). It plays an important role in the way consumers learn, interpret, and remember information (Forgas 1989) and can interfere with people’s ability to process persuasive messages (Mackie and Worth 1989). The effect of social norms on consumers’ decision-making depends not only on mood but also on the formulation of the social norm. Social norms can be formulated as descriptive norms, which describe what most others do in a given situation, or as injunctive norms, which prescribe certain behavior in a given situation (Cialdini et al. 1990). Different reasons drive conformity to injunctive versus descriptive norms, and consumers process the information that each norm conveys differently (Prislin and Wood 2005). Despite a large body of research on social norms (see Goldstein and Cialdini 2009) and on the role of mood in consumer behavior (see Gardner 1985), little is known about the effect of mood on social norms’ influence.

Using a Virtual Store As a Research Tool to Investigate Consumer In-store Behavior

Peoples responses to products and/or choice environments are crucial to understanding in-store consumer behaviors. Currently, there are various approaches (e.g., surveys or laboratory settings) to study in-store behaviors, but the external validity of these is limited by their poor capability to resemble realistic choice environments. In addition, building a real store to meet experimental conditions while controlling for undesirable effects is costly and highly difficult. A virtual store developed by virtual reality techniques potentially transcends these limitations by offering the simulation of a 3D virtual store environment in a realistic, flexible, and cost-efficient way. In particular, a virtual store interactively allows consumers (participants) to experience and interact with objects in a tightly controlled yet realistic setting. This paper presents the key elements of using a desktop virtual store to study in-store consumer behavior. Descriptions of the protocol steps to: 1) build the experimental store, 2) prepare the data management program, 3) run the virtual store experiment, and 4) organize and export data from the data management program are presented. The virtual store enables participants to navigate through the store, choose a product from alternatives, and select or return products. Moreover, consumer-related shopping behaviors (e.g., shopping time, walking speed, and number and type of products examined and bought) can also be collected. The protocol is illustrated with an example of a store layout experiment showing that shelf length and shelf orientation influence shopping- and movement-related behaviors. This demonstrates that the use of a virtual store facilitates the study of consumer responses. The virtual store can be especially helpful when examining factors that are costly or difficult to change in real life (e.g., overall store layout), products that are not presently available in the market, and routinized behaviors in familiar environments.