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Does label design affect consumers’ choice of food products?
How willing consumers are to choose more expensive products to mitigate environmental, health, and animal welfare harm was assessed. The influence of label design was also tested. The impact of label design differs depending on the information being conveyed.
This study aimed to understand how price, label information, and label design affect consumers’ food product choices. Varying information for four categories (environmental impact, health, antibiotic use, and animal welfare) was presented using three different label types. For the traffic-light label type, the categories were shown as red (bad), yellow (middling) or green (good). The information given was the same for the other two label types except that it was either presented in greyscale or as plain text (i.e., with no graphical information).
Participants were regular buyers of ready-made products that include meat. They were repeatedly presented with triads (two labelled, one unlabeled; varying price and information) of possible frozen lasagna options and selected the one that they believed they would buy.
The traffic-light design affected consumer choice, but the strength of the impact differed across information category. Red indicators had the strongest avoidance effect when signaling high environmental impact and use of antibiotics, whilst green indicators were most effective when indicating positive health information.
People responded that they were willing to pay upwards of 50% extra for products labelled as healthy, compared to the product rated lowest in this category, and around 64% extra for products labelled as avoiding overuse of antibiotics and good for animal welfare. Willingness to pay extra was lower for climate-related labels, at around 20%.
The extent to which individual action is perceived as useful or how graspable the impact of one’s own choices are in these categories may affect label effectiveness. Importantly, the results show that there is potential for utilizing label information and design, and that these can be tailored to maximize impact depending on what information is being conveyed to consumers.
This article was authored by Fredrik Carlsson, Mitesh Kataria, Elina Lampi, Erik Nyberg and Thomas Sterner at the University of Gothenburg.