Nutri-Score Vs. Nutrition Claim: The Effects of Incongruent Front-of-Pack Nutritional Information on Consumer Perceptions of Product Healthiness, Brand Attitude, and Purchase Intention

ABSTRACT

To encourage healthier food choices, an increasing number of EU governments introduced the Nutri-Score nutrition label on food package fronts. However, the label score, ranging from A (most healthy in comparison to food group alternatives) to E (least healthy), may conflict with marketing-incentivized nutrition claims that highlight positive nutritional aspects of foods (e.g., “high in fiber”) that are in fact of poor nutritional quality. To investigate how consumers respond to this discrepant front-of-pack nutritional information, we performed a 3 (Nutri-Score: A vs. E vs. absent) × 2 (Nutrition claim: present vs. absent) between-subjects experiment among 246 Dutch consumers, measuring perceived product healthiness, persuasion knowledge (i.e. critical awareness of the claim’s promotional intent), and marketing outcomes (i.e. brand attitude and purchase intention). Without a nutrition claim, breakfast cereal was perceived healthier with Nutri-Score A and less healthy with Nutri-Score E (vs. Nutri-Score absence), affecting marketing outcomes accordingly. However, in the presence of a nutrition claim (“no added sugars”), no Nutri-Score effects occurred. Nutri-Score presence was unable to interrupt the promotional effect of a concurrent nutrition claim on an E-labeled breakfast cereal. However, the more a nutrition claim was perceived as a misleading marketing attempt, the less positive its effects on consumer responses.

KEYWORDS:

• Nutri-Score
• nutrition claim
• perceived healthiness
• brand attitude
• purchase intention

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr Jos Bartels for proofreading a first draft of this article.

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors

Raw data were generated at Tilburg University. Derived data supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author L. Janssen on request.

Author contributions

Loes Janssen: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing-Original Draft, Writing-Review and Editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Eline Bogaert: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing-Original Draft, Project administration. Both authors have approved the final article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Two different a priori power analyses were used (due to limited software options) to estimate the minimum sample size required for testing our conceptual model (Figure 1). To estimate an adequate sample size for a 3 × 2 factorial design, we used G*power (Faul et al., 2007). Results suggested a sample size of N = 158 to achieve 80% power for detecting a medium sized effect, at α = .05. To estimate an adequate sample size for testing indirect effects with two serial mediators, we used the web application “Monte Carlo Power Analysis for Indirect Effects” developed by Schoemann et al. (2017). Results suggested a sample size of N = 140 to achieve 80% power for detecting medium sized effects, at α = .05. Thus, the obtained sample size (N = 246) is reasonable for testing our model. One participant was excluded from the original sample of 247 participants, because scores deviated more than 3 SD from the mean on healthiness perceptions, persuasion knowledge, and brand attitude, due to questionnaire straightlining.

² Randomization checks showed that there were no differences between the six conditions of the experiment with respect to age, F(5, 246) = 1.52, p = .184, gender, χ2 (5, N = 246) = 2.01, p = .848, and educational level, χ² (20, N = 246) = 21.01, p = .397.

³ Answering options were “healthy”/“neither healthy nor unhealthy”/“unhealthy”/“most environmentally friendly”/“least environmentally friendly”/“biological”/“other” (the last four answering options served as fillers). This question was asked after participants were confronted with the stimulus materials and main measurements, as not to bias their responses.

⁴ M = 4.10, SD =.51; measured with one item on a 5-point Likert-scale (1 = very incomprehensible; 5 = very comprehensible).

⁵ Healthy eating concern significantly correlated with healthiness perceptions (r = −.19, p = .003) and brand attitude (r = −.13, p = .036).

⁶ Healthy eating concern was entered as covariate in the analysis with brand attitude as dependent variable, because it significantly correlated with brand attitude (r = −.13, p = .036).