Does Nutrition Information Contribute to Grocery Shoppers’ Willingness to Pay?

ABSTRACT

An experimental auction and the eye-tracking technology are used to detect the relationship between consumers’ understanding of the nutrition information and their willingness to pay for food items. Additional attention is given to health-conscious individuals. Salad mix and apple juice are selected for the experiment. A Tobit model is used for the analysis. The results show that nutrition information has some effect on consumers’ purchasing decision. Shoppers are willing to pay less for fat and mineral information, but more for ingredient, protein, sodium, and carbohydrate information of salad mix. As for apple juice, shoppers care only for energy and other nutrient information, as well as the health claim “vitamin C naturally high.” Further, health-conscious individuals are more responsive to the nutrition claims, such as “high in fiber” (salad mix) and “vitamin C naturally high” (orange juice). A possible limitation of the conclusion exists due to the small sample size.

KEYWORDS:

• Eye-tracking
• nutrition information
• willingness to pay

Notes

¹ Brand is not included due to the experimental nature of the research.

² For instance, with regular salad mix, the fiber content is 8%, whereas with “high in fiber” salad, the fiber content is 16%. Similarly, the vitamin C level for regular apple juice is 4%, whereas that for “naturally high in vitamin C” apple juice is 50% and that for “vitamin C enriched” apple juice is 120%.

³ The purpose of the candy bar introduction slides was to familiarize the participants with the technique and technology and to give them ample opportunities to ask questions. Additionally, the introduction slides gave the monitor the opportunity to remind the participant to wait for the prompt slide to submit their bids. As a result, the data are easier to analyze due to the participants focusing on the image instead of looking down at their bid sheets.

⁴ The combination is conducted in accordance with the eight categories of nutrition information defined by Food and Agriculture Organization, with slight modification for each product.

⁵ Fiber content for salad with a nutrition claim of “high in fiber” is 16%, whereas that for salad without a nutrition claim is 8%.

⁶ The complete sentence at the bottom of the apple juice label is “Not a significant source of calories from fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, dietary fiber, vitamin A, calcium, and iron.”

⁷ Marginal effect is the incremental effect on income or expense caused by a change in the explanatory variable. For instance, a marginal effect of 0.274 for “made in MN” indicates that when food is made in MN, the bidding price of the food will go up by 27 cents.

⁸ The marginal effect of certain nutrition information for a health-conscious individual equals to the summation of the estimated marginal effect of the nutrition content and that of the interaction term, if both are significant. For instance, the marginal effect of energy information of salad for a health-conscious individual is the summation of 0.065 and −0.072, which is −0.007.