Truthful yet misleading: Consumer response to ‘low fat’ food with high sugar content

Abstract

Marketers use nutrition claims to communicate potentially beneficial nutritional properties of their products. Claims may only be used if a product has a specific nutrient profile. A downside of nutrition claims is that consumers tend to overgeneralize their meaning, perceiving a product as healthier than it is. This becomes particularly problematic when claims emphasize low amounts of one nutrient while the product contains high amounts of other, typically unhealthy, unmentioned nutrients—a phenomenon which has received little attention in extant literature. This research examines how consumers perceive food with ‘low fat’ claims in terms of sugar content, and how consumers respond when front-of-package (FOP) nutrition information reveals the high amounts of sugar for that product. The empirical part comprises three different experiments with consumers from the United States (total N = 760). Data were analyzed using ANCOVA to evaluate interaction effects and regression-based mediation analysis to assess the underlying mechanism. Results indicate biased consumer expectations regarding sugar content for products with ‘low fat’ claims. The presence of FOP nutrition labels reveals such claim-induced expectation gaps with nuanced changes in nutrient evaluation and purchase intention. This research provides important implications for consumer food choice. Marketers would be better off avoiding the use of misleading nutrition claims as a food marketing tool to avoid detrimental effects to their consumers and business performance. For public policy implications, this study demonstrates that reductive FOP nutrition labels are effective in mitigating the harm induced by potentially misleading nutrition claims.