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 Pinto De Albuquerque, Olivier Allais, Céline Bonnet, Patrice Bertail, Pierre Combris, Saadi Lahlou, Nathalie Rigal, Bernard Ruffieux and Pierre Chandon
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Pierre Dubois: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Paulo Pinto De Albuquerque: INSEAD, France.
Olivier Allais: INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Céline Bonnet: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Patrice Bertail: Paris Nanterre University, Nanterre, France
Pierre Combris: INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Saadi Lahlou: LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science
Nathalie Rigal: Paris Nanterre University, Nanterre, France
Bernard Ruffieux: INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Pierre Chandon: INSEAD, France.

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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: Nutrition; Labelling; Supermarket; RCT; Food; Field experiment; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09-08
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05742098v1
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