Consumer confusion about wholegrain content and healthfulness in product labels: a discrete choice experiment and comprehension assessment

Abstract

Objective: Using a legal standard for scrutinising the regulation of food label claims, this study assessed whether consumers are misled about wholegrain (WG) content and product healthfulness based on common product labels.

Design: First, a discrete choice experiment used pairs of hypothetical products with different amounts of WG, sugar and salt to measure effects on assessment of healthfulness; and second, a WG content comprehension assessment used actual product labels to assess respondent understanding.

Setting: Online national panel survey.

Participants: For a representative sample of US adults (n 1030), survey responses were collected in 2018 and analysed in 2019.

Results: First, 29-47 % of respondents incorrectly identified the healthier product from paired options, and respondents who self-identified as having difficulty in understanding labels were more likely to err. Second, for actual products composed primarily of refined grains, 43-51 % of respondents overstated the WG content, whereas for one product composed primarily of WG, 17 % of respondents understated the WG content.

Conclusions: The frequency of consumer misunderstanding of grain product labels was high in both study components. Potential policies to address consumer confusion include requiring disclosure of WG content as a percentage of total grain content or requiring disclosure of the grams of WG v. refined grains per serving.

Keywords: Consumer confusion; Food labels; Nutrition policy; Whole grains.

Fig. 1

Relative frequency of incorrect responses (stating that the whole grain (WG) labelled option was healthier or both options were equally healthy, in trials of hypothetical product pairs for which the unlabelled option was healthier). Online supplementary material, Supplemental Table 1 provides standard errors, and Supplemental Figure 1 provides disaggregated results for three randomly assigned variations of the product labels