Interesting Results

Changing Labels May Not Change Knowledge or Behaviour

In the early 1990s, changes to U.S. law increased the amount of information food manufacturers were required to put on their products and created requirements for how this information is displayed. Researchers investigating whether this law resulted in changed consumer knowledge or behaviour found¹:

No difference in the amount of time consumers spent reading nutritional labels before and after the law was implemented.
No overall improvement in the efficiency of recall for nutritional information (this measures the amount of information consumers are able to recall based on the amount of time they spend looking at a nutritional label).
Consumers paid more attention to negative attributes (e.g. fat) than to positive attributes (e.g. vitamins) following the introduction of the new labelling.

¹ Balasubramanian, Siva K. and Catherine Cole (2002), “Consumers’ Search and Use of Nutritional Information: The Challenge and Promise of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act”, Journal of Marketing, 66(3), 112-127.