Developing a digital toolkit to enhance the communication of health claims: The Health Claims Unpacked project

Abstract

Consumer understanding and acceptance of health claims are influenced by a variety of factors including personal knowledge and familiarity with the information, characteristics of the product (such as the ingredients) and the way the claim is presented (e.g. wording and visual aids such as symbols). The official wording of authorised EU health claims is set by the European Commission (EC), though there is some flexibility, in that food companies can change the wording to aid consumer understanding of the claim as long as the original meaning is retained and the modified version does not mislead. An EIT Food‐funded project with the consumer‐facing title Health Claims Unpacked, consists of an international consortium aiming to develop a digital toolkit to investigate consumers’ responses to health claims and aid their understanding thereof. Developed firstly in English (and now also in other EU languages such as German, French and Polish), the toolkit is informed by research in linguistics, design, nutrition science, technology and behavioural economics as well as focus groups with consumers and interviews with the food industry. The format of the toolkit is an interactive web app comprising activities which are used to gather data regarding consumers’ responses to different kinds of linguistic, semiotic (signs and symbols) and marketing cues related to health claims and how these cues impact their understanding of the relationship between nutrients/food components and health, trust in the message and willingness to pay for products. The data will be used to provide information on the preferences of different demographic groups on the wording of health claims and to provide recommendations for stakeholders aiming to enhance the communication of health claims on food and drink labels.

Fifteen Years of Regulating Nutrition and Health Claims in Europe: The Past, the Present and the Future

“…Whilst there is some uncertainty on how nutrition and health claims exactly affect purchasing, claims are used by food business operators to allow their potential customer to show the uniqueness of their products [108]. With an increasing number of targeted, health-influencing products becoming available on the market, it remains important to gain further insights into when-and in what type of wording [109]-such claims can be considered a credible, useful and non-misleading source of information.…”

“…As with any EU legislation, MSs are responsible for enforcing the NHCR within their jurisdictions. Various MSs provide clear information on how their competent authorities interpret the regulation, by for example providing guidance documents or by making agreements with self-regulating bodies [72,109]. With the aim of the regulation being to protect consumers from misleading information, food law enforcement priorities of these competent authorities may be more focused on protecting consumers from unsafe products instead of reviewing whether nutrition and health claims are used correctly.…”

Nature of the evidence base and strengths, challenges and recommendations in the area of nutrition and health claims: a position paper from the Academy of Nutrition Sciences

“…Although the scientific rigour of the approval process in the EU and UK should provide consumers with assurance about the validity of authorised health claims, some consumers view health claims with scepticism. Findings from Health Claims Unpacked showed a high proportion of consumers surveyed in the UK, France, Germany and Poland perceive health claims simply as a marketing tool ( 94 ) . This project, funded by EIT-Food, gathered data from large numbers of consumers in these four countries, and found a distinct lack of preference for authorised claim wording compared with alternative, similar wording ( 94 ) .…”

“…Findings from Health Claims Unpacked showed a high proportion of consumers surveyed in the UK, France, Germany and Poland perceive health claims simply as a marketing tool ( 94 ) . This project, funded by EIT-Food, gathered data from large numbers of consumers in these four countries, and found a distinct lack of preference for authorised claim wording compared with alternative, similar wording ( 94 ) . For example, when asked to choose their own wording for a claim from a selection of relevant words and phrases, the word ‘normal’ (which features in many authorised claims written in English) was only chosen by a very small proportion of participants, with most opting for alternatives such as ‘healthy’.…”

Bridging gaps in food labelling

“…This Virtual Issue on Food Labelling brings together ten papers recently published in Nutrition Bulletin discussing different aspects of food and nutrition labelling, including nutrient profiling models, food composition data, health claims and consumer understanding of nutrition labels (Chio et al, 2021;Gibson-Moore & Spiro, 2021;Jenneson et al, 2020;Jenneson & Morris, 2021;Lockyer et al, 2020aLockyer et al, , 2020bMansilla et al, 2021;Silva et al, 2021;Spiro & Wood, 2021;Traka et al, 2020). Despite ending up on the same packages, nutrition and environmental labels have had a rather independent course of development.…”