Beyond Healthiness: The Impact of Traffic Light Labels on Taste Expectations and Purchase Intentions.

Sonja Kunz,Arnd Florack,Jannik Rieß,Simona Haasova

doi:10.3390/foods9020134

Abstract

The aim of traffic light labels on food products is to help consumers assess their healthiness. However, it is not clear whether traffic light labels do not have undesired side effects by signaling lower tastiness of healthy product alternatives and reducing purchase intentions. We therefore conducted a study with consumers from Austria (N = 173) in which we presented the amount of sugar contained in products on labels with or without traffic light colors based on the coding criteria of the UK Food Standards Agency. Expectations of products’ healthiness and tastiness, as well as purchase intentions were assessed. The products were randomly sampled from the category of desserts from a supermarket. The declared amount of sugar was experimentally varied. The traffic light labels helped participants differentiate between the healthiness of products with different sugar levels. They did not affect the expected tastiness of the healthier alternatives. Moreover, participants did not report lower purchase intentions for products high in sugar, but a higher purchase intention for products low in sugar when traffic light colors were used compared to when they were not used.

Highlights

A balanced, healthful diet is one of the most important factors that contributes to staying healthy and avoiding all kinds of diseases
Since different countries consider making traffic light labels on food products obligatory, it is crucial to investigate their effects on food expectations and evaluations, their possible negative effects that might arise due to reactance elicited by the labeling system
Whereas traffic light labels have been shown to improve the accuracy of healthiness estimations of food products [12,13,14], it has been unknown whether they have the unwanted side effect of reducing perceived tastiness and purchase intentions of food products considered healthier, such as products low in sugar

Summary

Introduction

A balanced, healthful diet is one of the most important factors that contributes to staying healthy and avoiding all kinds of diseases. One of the major causes for overweight and obesity is an increased consumption of high-energy foods, which contain a lot of fat or sugar. Various health campaigns label processed food products in a way that allows consumers to assess important dietary information about the products. Already practiced in the UK, is to place traffic light nutrition labels on food items. The traffic light labels indicate the levels of four key nutrients (i.e., fat, sugar, saturates, and salt) commonly contained in processed food, with red indicating a high level, amber a medium level, and green a low level of the respective nutrient. The purpose of the traffic light system is to advise consumers against choosing products with a high amount of these ingredients and assisting them in making healthier food choices [2]. Research findings are inconclusive regarding the system’s effectiveness [3,4,5,6,7,8,9]

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