New review breaks down consumer perception of health claims
Published in the Journal of Functional Foods, the new paper reviews 42 different studies that have recently investigated the ways in which health claims influence consumers.
The studies included in the review, which were published between 1992 and 2007, investigated health claims in the context of consumers’ perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and behavior, consumers’ ability to evaluate specific nutrients on food products, consumers’ use of nutrient labels and communication and framing of health claims.
Food industry risk?
The researchers said their findings indicate the “potential, although still not firmly substantiated, risk for the food industry (…) that health claims may not play such an important role in influencing purchase behavior, as price and taste do”.
This can be linked back to contradictory findings from different studies, with some papers identifying an increased consumption in the presence of health claims, while others reported a low prevalence of purchased products.
“A possible explanation may be that consumers may buy from habit, experience and past behavior, [that they] do not tend to read labels and/or that they do not understand the information that they read,” wrote the researchers from the Agricultural University of Athens, Greece, in a paper entitled Health Claims: Consumers’ Matters.
The majority (21) of the papers included in the current review were conducted in the United States. A further 16 studies were conducted in European countries (UK, Ireland, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands), while the remaining studies came from Australia, Brazil and Canada.
The studies were both qualitative and quantitative in nature, and assessment tools primarily included questionnaires.
Perception of healthfulness
Although many findings were contradictory, making it difficult to draw consistent conclusions, one point highlighted by the researchers was the importance of pre-existing consumer beliefs on the healthfulness of products.
“Although health claims may influence perceptions of healthiness and quality of a product, these do not appear overall to affect consumers’ beliefs and pre-existing notions about products per se,” they wrote, but added that repeated exposure to health information has been found to influence product liking.
However, another challenge is the type of health information that reaches consumers, and how the information provided in health claims corresponds to this.
According to the researchers, consumers are usually confused regarding what the exact benefits of health claims are.
“An explanation to this is that health claims refer to health benefits that cannot be instantly experienced by consumers; thus, these health benefits need to be communicated by other means of information than the product itself,” they wrote.
“However, the question remains whether consumers indicate trust to these other sources of information. Furthermore, it needs to be noted that because labeling regulations still differ among countries, research on health claims should also take into consideration wider societal and cultural issues that may influence consumers’ trust and practices.”
Other findings highlighted in the paper are that consumers tend to prefer shorter health claims, and they pay more attention to information presented in prominent positions.
In addition, when comparing between disease-risk reduction and health-enhancing claims, consumers find disease-risk prevention claims “more appealing and convincing”, especially if these relate to an illness that they may be suffering from.
Source:Health Claims: Consumers’ mattersJournal of Functional Foods (2009)Authors: Pothoulaki, M., & Chryssochoidis, G.doi:10.1016/j.jff.2009.01.012
