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
Patrice Bertail: MODAL'X - Modélisation aléatoire de Paris X - UPN - Université Paris Nanterre - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Pierre Combris: ALISS - Alimentation et sciences sociales - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Saadi Lahlou: LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science
Natalie Rigal: UPN - Université Paris Nanterre, CliPsyD - Clinique, Psychanalyse, Développement - UPN - Université Paris Nanterre
Bernard Ruffieux: GAEL - Laboratoire d'Economie Appliquée de Grenoble - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement - UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes - Grenoble INP - Institut polytechnique de Grenoble - Grenoble Institute of Technology - UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes
Pierre Chandon: INSEAD - Institut Européen d'administration des Affaires

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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 1,266 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: Policy; Field experiment; Food; RCT; Nutrition -; Labelling; Supermarket (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hea
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02562456v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2020, 49 (Online Early), pp.1-52. ⟨10.1007/s11747-020-00723-5⟩

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Related works:
Journal Article: 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 (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)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02562456

DOI: 10.1007/s11747-020-00723-5

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