When Calorie Counters Influence Food Choices: An Abstract

Nutrition labels are displayed on an individual product-by-product basis and are designed to simplify the decision making process by making such labels easier to understand. Despite being intuitively simple, the evidence for the effectiveness of such labels in reducing obesity and other food related health conditions is mixed. Digital technologies that present information in simpler, more accessible ways are increasingly demanded by consumers, yet we know little about how they impact decision making. One way to assist consumer processing of the available nutritional information is to present it in a more aggregated format (e.g., by basket) to overcome numeracy biases. To see how such aggregated nutritional information impacted food choices we designed an online shopping experiment which presented consumers with aggregated calorie information and compared the choices made to those with individual product nutritional information (and a control group with no nutritional information). We also looked at the impact of time pressure (no time pressure versus time pressure) and shop type (3-day fill-in shop versus 5-day full shop). The experiment was run on two groups of people, including a general sample of the UK population and a subset of this population who had an existing health condition. The results show the calorie counter leads to a reduction in the amount of calories chosen by about 9%. This is comparable to some estimates of the effectiveness of the UK’s 20% sugar tax (5%). Results were moderated by whether or not the respondent had an existing health condition, shopping duration and time pressure (which nullified the effect of any nutritional information). The findings illustrate that such technologies hold a great deal of promise in affecting food choice but further research is needed in the field to observe what happens in more realistic settings. There is also a need to study what is being consumed rather than what is being bought.