Despite all of the regulations in place to ensure food nutrition labels are both uniformly clear and informative to consumers, it turns out most consumers don’t pay them much mind, making a plausible case for a redesign of existing Nutrition Facts labels, according to a study published in the Journal of the America Dietetic Association.
 
The study, which involved a simulated grocery shopping exercise conducted on a computer equipped with an eye-tracking camera, tracked the visual attention of 203 individuals from Minnesota (predominantly Caucasian women) as they made simulated food-purchasing decisions. Each of the 64 items they were shown on-screen contained three elements: the standard Nutrition Facts label, a picture and list of ingredients, and a description of the product with price and quantity information. The three elements were presented so that one third of the participants each saw the Nutrition Facts label on the left, right and center. Each subject was asked whether they would consider buying the product. And while participants were aware that their eye movements would be tracked, they were unaware that the study focus was nutrition information.
 
The participants later completed a questionnaire about their normal shopping habits to help researchers assess Nutrition Facts label viewing.
 
The researchers found consumers’ self-reported viewing of Nutrition Facts label components to be higher than objectively measured viewing using an eye-tracking device. They also determined that centrally located Nutrition Facts labels are viewed more frequently and for longer than those located peripherally, while observing that most consumers view uppermost situated label components more thoroughly than those placed at the bottom. In fact, the researchers stated that further data suggested the average consumer reads only the top five lines on a Nutrition Facts label.
 
“The results of this study suggest that consumers have a finite attention span for Nutrition Facts labels: although most consumers did view labels, very few consumers viewed every component on any label,” according to investigators Dan Graham, PhD, and Robert Jeffrey, PhD, Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “These results differed from the self-reported survey responses describing typical grocery shopping and health behaviors submitted by the participants.”
 
Positioning is Paramount
 
After surveying their findings, the researchers asserted that because most U.S. Nutrition Facts labels are currently positioned peripherally—not centrally—on food packages, the labels may be less likely to catch and hold the eye of a potential consumer.
 
Self-reported viewing of Nutrition Facts label components was higher than objectively measured viewing. About one third of the participants self-reported that they almost always look at calorie content on Nutrition Facts labels, 31% reported that they almost always look at the total fat content, 20% said the same for trans-fat content, 24% for sugar content, and 26% for serving size. However, only 9% of participants actually looked at calorie count for almost all of the products in this study, and about 1% of participants looked at each of these other components (total fat, trans fat, sugar and serving size) on almost all labels.
 
When the Nutrition Facts label was presented in the center column, subjects read one or more sections of 61% of the labels compared with 37% and 34% of labels among participants randomly assigned to view labels on the left- and right-hand sides of the screen, respectively. In addition, labels in the center column received more than 30% more view time than the same labels when located in a side column.
 
“Taken together, these results indicate that self-reported Nutrition Facts label use does not accurately represent in vivo use of labels and their components while engaging in a simulated shopping exercise. In addition, location of labels and of specific label components relate to viewing,” the researchers concluded. “Consumers are more likely to view centrally located labels and nutrients nearer the label’s top. Because knowing the amounts of key nutrients that foods contain can influence consumers to make healthier purchases, prominently positioning key nutrients, and labels themselves, could substantially impact public health.”
 
For more information on this study, titled “Location, Location, Location: Eye-Tracking Evidence that Consumers Preferentially View Prominently Positioned Nutrition Information,” follow this link.