Helping Consumers Use Nutrition Information: Effects of Format and Presentation

Recent policy efforts aimed at curbing obesity rates in the United States have focused primarily on mandated posting of calorie information. However, the research to date suggests that such interventions have relatively little impact on consumer choices. This paper explores whether alternative approaches to communicating nutrition information might increase its impact on consumer choice as well as whether the presence of calorie information affects the effectiveness of other policy approaches. Study 1 tests a variety of methods for conveying nutrition information to promote choice of lower-calorie snack items, including basic numerical information, contextualized numeric information, and heuristic cues such as traffic lights and letter grades. Results suggest that using heuristic cues to communicate the information holds special promise for changing behavior. Study 2 examines the interactive impact of calorie labeling and choice architecture (presenting options in caloric sequence), and shows that calorie information has a beneficial impact, but only when organization of snacks by caloric content facilitates use of the information. These results speak to the importance of understanding how combinations of policy approaches can trigger nonobvious consumer responses, activating different psychological processes when implemented together or individually. They suggest that novel policies to enhance the effectiveness of existing legislation deserve further investigation.