Henrik Selsøe Sørensen

Food labels – an exploratory study into label information and what consumers see and understand

The food industry develops tasty and healthy food but fails to deliver the message to all consumers. The consumers’ background knowledge is essential for how they find and decode relevant elements in the cocktail of signs which fight for attention on food labels. In this exploratory study, we find evidence for dividing consumers into two profiles: one relying on general food knowledge and another using knowledge related to signpost labels. In a combined eyetracking and questionnaire survey we analyse the influence of background knowledge and identify different patterns of visual attention for the two consumer profiles. This underlines the complexity in choosing and designing the ‘right’ elements for a food package that consumers actually look at and are able to make rational use of. In spite of any regulation of food information provided by authorities, consumers will still be confronted with information which puzzles them. Given that the notion of being mislead must refer to information printed on the packaging and which has actually caught the given consumers visual attention, this exploratory study intends to pave the way for using eyetracking tools to better understand the link between regulations, package information, and consumer understanding. Implications and further research are discussed.

Do natural pictures mean natural tastes? Assessing visual semantics experimentally

Abstract A widespread assumption in Danish consumer law is that if the package of a food product carries a picture of a potentially taste-giving ingredient (say, a strawberry), then consumers will expect the corresponding taste to stem primarily from that ingredient rather than from artificial flavouring. However, this is not expected to be the case if the packaging carries only a verbal indication of the potential ingredient (say, the word strawberry). We put these assumptions to experimental test. Our goal was to contribute firmer evidence to the legal decision-making in the present field while at the same time providing new perspectives and data to the general theoretical debate on the communicative potential of pictures versus words. Our findings showed that pictures did have an effect on assessments of naturalness that was however marginal compared to that of product type. Moreover, participants’ general level of food knowledge had a significant influence on their expectations about naturalness.

Consumer Understanding of Food Labels: Toward a Generic Tool for Identifying the Average Consumer.: Report from a Danish Exploration.

The ‘average consumer’ is referred to as a standard in regulatory contexts when attempts are made to benchmark how consumers are expected to reason while decoding food labels. An attempt is made to operationalize this hypothetical ‘average consumer’ by proposing a tool for measuring the level of informedness of an individual consumer against the national median at any time. Informedness, i.e. the individual consumers ability to interpret correctly the meaning of the words and signs on a food label is isolated as one essential dimension for dividing consumers into three groups: less-informed, informed, and highly informed consumers. Consumer informedness is assessed using a 60-question test related to information found on a variety of Danish everyday food products and divided into factual questions and informedness about signpost labels. A test was made with 407 respondents who participated in four independent studies on fairness in consumer communication, and the average score for all was 57.6% of correct answers. A score of 64% and beyond would place a consumer in the upper quartile (the group of highly informed consumers), whereas a score of 52% or below would place the individual in the lower quartile (the group of less-informed consumers). Female respondents performed better than males on label recognition, and those around 40 years of age irrespective of gender performed best on factual knowledge, whereas those aged around 30 performed best on label recognition. It is foreseen that independent future studies of consumer behavior and decision making in relation to food products in different contexts could benefit from this type of benchmarking tool.

LinguaNet: Embedded MT in a Cross-Border Messaging Systemfor European Law Enforcement

Globalisation of crime poses a serious threat to the international community and is a matter of growing concern to law enforcement agencies all over the world. In the combat against international and organized crime, the European Union (EU) has supported a number of research and development projects within the domain of law enforcement focusing on cross-border communication, information extraction and data analysis in a multilingual context as well as terminology and knowledge management. LinguaNet is a case in point and the only project involving a multilingual messaging system. A high level of user involvement was a prominent feature of the project and the resulting software – the LinguaNet system – has gained widespread recognition and usage. The paper gives an overview of the LinguaNet approach as a whole emphasising the temporary experimental embedding of fully automatic MT in a multilingual messaging system. The system is intended for use by professionals with no background in linguistics but in great need of fast and robust communication. One of the conclusions drawn from this experiment is that authoring errors proved to be much more counter-productive than insufficiencies of MT. Another conclusion is that it is preferable to leave it to the recipient of a message to request a machine translation rather than providing it automatically up front. In more general terms, the police liked the approach and reported the need for more message type templates and MT facilities. Finally, the project lead to the formation of a European LinguaNet user group network.