Effects of environmental and nutritional labels on the dietary choices of consumers: Evidence from China

Abstract

Dietary change has great potential to deliver food-related environmental benefits and human health advantages. Labeling has been proven effective in dietary behavior change as a “low-hanging fruit” among nudging methods, yet the experimental analysis in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is lacking. In this research, a real-world intervention experiment is designed to explore the effects of color-based carbon footprint and calorie content labeling schemes on the sales of dumpling in two Chinese university canteens. The sample for the control phrase and label phrase respectively consisted of 8755 and 9492 records. Overall, fewer consumers choose to dine (−15.25%) when the label interventions were in place to release from ethical dilemma. Detailed analyses show that environmental labeling results in a significant reduction in purchases of dumplings with high carbon footprints, cutting down 20.40 (15.25% of average daily sales, the same as other percentage data) sale units (‘Liang’ in Chinese, one sale unit empirically corresponding to 6 dumplings) and leading to ∼26.90% of total GHG mitigation, while calorie labeling raises the purchase of dumplings with both low and high energy density, raising 59.88 (7.56%) and 48.66 (6.14%) sale units respectively at the day level. Labeling induces effective response demographically heterogeneous, with men more sensitive to calorie labels within the U-shape trend while women more impacted by environmental labels. Also, postgraduates show greater perceptiveness to the intervention compared to undergraduates. Our evaluation of labeling effects suggests a well-designed and population-tailored label highlighting negative information such as immense environmental burdens would offer a promising and feasible chance to navigate consumers' behavior. Our findings provide implications for effective intervention strategy design in China, indicating extensive inspiration for a potential larger-scale dietary structure evolution and promising behavior intervention.