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The effect of front‐of‐package nutrition labels on the choice of low sugar products
Author(s) -
Mauri Chiara,
Grazzini Laura,
Ulqinaku Aulona,
Poletti Erika
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
psychology and marketing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.035
H-Index - 116
eISSN - 1520-6793
pISSN - 0742-6046
DOI - 10.1002/mar.21473
Subject(s) - sugar , product (mathematics) , added sugar , nutrition facts label , food choice , ingredient , food products , psychology , food science , advertising , marketing , business , medicine , mathematics , biology , pathology , geometry
Abstract 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.