Consumers’ knowledge gain through a cross-category environmental label

Abstract

Consumers' food choices play a crucial role in the shift toward increased sustainability. However, consumers' knowledge about daily food items is not sufficient to evoke environmentally friendly food choices. To facilitate a shift towards more sustainable food consumption, providing understandable information about the environmental impact of products in an easily accessible and effective way seems to be promising. With this outcome in view, we created a new label and tested its effectiveness in improving people's accuracy in evaluating the environmental friendliness of food products. The proposed label is based on life cycle assessment (LCA) and designed to compare food items across food categories through a color-coded scheme. In an online choice task, participants were asked to choose the more environmentally friendly product of two options. Depending on the condition, the products were either labeled or not. As expected, the number of correct choices was significantly higher when the products were labeled (vs. not). Moreover, participants had a positive attitude toward the cross-category label; they evaluated it as comprehensible, credible and useful. The majority of participants indicated that they would be willing to include the label in their shopping decisions, if it were introduced to the market. Altogether, the present research provides evidence that a color-coded sustainability label is suitable for informing consumers about the environmental impact of food products and helps them identify environmentally friendly products.