Effects of front-of-pack labels on the nutritional quality of supermarket food purchases: evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial

Pierre Dubois, Paulo Albuquerque, Olivier Allais, Céline Bonnet, Patrice Bertail, Pierre Combris, Saadi Lahlou, Natalie Rigal, Bernard Ruffieux and Pierre Chandon ()
Additional contact information
Olivier Allais: INRAE
Patrice Bertail: University Paris Nanterre
Pierre Combris: INRAE
Saadi Lahlou: London School of Economics and Political Science
Natalie Rigal: University Paris Nanterre
Bernard Ruffieux: Grenoble INP, INRAE
Pierre Chandon: INSEAD

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2021, vol. 49, issue 1, No 7, 119-138

Abstract: Abstract To examine whether four pre-selected front-of-pack nutrition labels improve food purchases in real-life grocery shopping settings, we put 1.9 million labels on 1266 food products in four categories in 60 supermarkets and analyzed the nutritional quality of 1,668,301 purchases using the FSA nutrient profiling score. Effect sizes were 17 times smaller on average than those found in comparable laboratory studies. The most effective nutrition label, Nutri-Score, increased the purchases of foods in the top third of their category nutrition-wise by 14%, but had no impact on the purchases of foods with medium, low, or unlabeled nutrition quality. Therefore, Nutri-Score only improved the nutritional quality of the basket of labeled foods purchased by 2.5% (−0.142 FSA points). Nutri-Score’s performance improved with the variance (but not the mean) of the nutritional quality of the category. In-store surveys suggest that Nutri-Score’s ability to attract attention and help shoppers rank products by nutritional quality may explain its performance.

Keywords: Nutrition; Labelling; Supermarket; RCT; Food; Field experiment; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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Working Paper: Effects of front-of-pack labels on the nutritional quality of supermarket food purchases: evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial (2021)
Working Paper: Effects of front-of-pack labels on the nutritional quality of supermarket food purchases: evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial (2020)
Working Paper: Effects of front-of-pack labels on the nutritional quality of supermarket food purchases: evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial (2020)
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DOI: 10.1007/s11747-020-00723-5

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