Nutrition labels and fast food
Nutritional cues offer a unique way of influencing fast-food purchasing decisions, but the many forms that these cues take been implicitly assumed to offer uniform benefits for consumers. The real-world offering of nutritional cues by producers, therefore, ranges from very elaborate and detailed displays of nutrition information, to entirely abstracted basic colored symbols. We find that consumers will actually reject health information when it is overly detailed, or too abstracted, and only make use of nutritional cues when they make sufficient trade-offs between the amount of information provided, and the ease-of-use, striking a delicate balance for consumers. Examples of such extremes and a more balanced example (center) are shown below. [Andrew Montandon & Chris Colli. British Food Journal, 2016] [Link]
Range of nutritional labelling methods, evaluated in a fast-food context.
