Going healthy: how product characteristics influence the sales impact of front-of-pack health symbols

Abstract

Manufacturers increasingly adopt health symbols, which translate overall product healthiness into a single symbol, to communicate about the overall healthiness of their grocery products. This study examines how the performance implications of adding a front-of-pack health symbol to a product vary across products. We study the sales impact of a government-supported health symbol program in 29 packaged categories, using over four years of scanner data. The results indicate that health symbols are most impactful when they positively disconfirm pre-existing beliefs that a product is not among the healthiest products within the category. More specifically, we find that health symbols are more effective for (i) products with a front-of-pack taste claim, (ii) lower priced products, and (iii) private label products. Furthermore, these results are more pronounced in healthier categories than in unhealthier categories. Our findings imply that health symbols can help overcome lay beliefs among consumers regarding a product’s overall healthiness. As such, adding a health symbol provides easy-to-process information about product healthiness for the consumer and can increase product sales for the manufacturer.

The effects of combining front‐of‐pack nutritional labels on consumers' subjective understanding, trust, and preferences

“…Future research could also consider the conative component of the model by, for example, investigating actual purchase behavior. As a large part of the extant literature is largely laboratory‐based, and a very limited number of studies have investigated the impact in a grocery setting (e.g., Dubois et al, 2021; Maesen et al, 2022), in‐store experiments could be run—in partnership with retailers—to explore the effects of a front‐of‐pack nutritional label directiveness‐based system on consumer behavior and whether the labels are effective in changing actual consumer decisions. Additionally, future research could empirically test the underlying mechanism of the relationship between combinations of front‐of‐pack nutritional label directiveness‐based systems and consumer understanding.…”

Dynamics of demand-side and supply-side responses to front-of-pack nutrition labels: a narrative review

“…Therefore, consumers' demand for nutritionally improved foods might decrease (Haws et al, 2017;Van Camp et al, 2010). In fact, the effect of FOP labels (especially evaluative-positive logos or the green colour of evaluativegraded FOP labels) is expected to be more pronounced in healthier than in unhealthier categories because they reach a consumer segment that is more interested in health than taste, as highlighted in (Vyth et al, 2010a;Maesen et al, 2021). Another reason why production costs may not be offset by sales is the higher costs of healthy foods compared to less healthy alternatives.…”

Uncovering the Effect of European Policy-Making Initiatives in Addressing Nutrition-Related Issues: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis on Front-of-Pack Labels

“…More recent contributions continue to highlight the relevance of FoPL and their positive effects on consumers' choices [5,[131][132][133][134][135][136][137]. However, there is still a multitude of valid effects demonstrated without a full convergence of the authors [3].…”