What If You Stop and Think About It? Nutrition Logos and Product Selection Behavior

This study explores the effect of a health involvement manipulation on food choices and how food choices are influenced by front-of-pack nutrition labels. The results show that without health involvement, choice was significantly affected by both nutrition labels and product type, but the product choice with health involvement was affected only by whether the product was selected as the healthier one in the involvement manipulation stage. Moreover, selection of the healthiest product during the manipulation stage was affected by the product type but not the front-of-pack (FOP) labels, potentially because participants relied on their own knowledge or the product perception to assess the healthiness of the product rather than the label information. The implication is that consumers seem to behave differently when pushed into a “choose healthy” state of mind, and their reliance on label information to assess product healthiness may be product and context dependent.

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