Consumers' Use of Nutritional Labels While Food Shopping and At Home

INTRODUCTION The Nutritional Labeling Education Act (NLEA) was signed into law on November 8, 1990. The objective of this legislation was to provide consumers with information that would assist them in maintaining healthy dietary practices. In part, this involved designing a consistent, understandable, and usable nutrition label. The NLEA instituted sweeping changes to replace the voluntary system of labeling established by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations in 1973. The new food labeling legislation mandated nutrition labeling on most processed foods under the jurisdiction of the FDA, established reference Daily Values for certain nutrients, defined serving sizes, and limited health claims. It also established guidelines for voluntary labeling of raw fruits, vegetables, and seafood. In order to establish or maintain healthy dietary practices, consumers must have the necessary information available and actively seek that information. The effectiveness of nutrition information programs, therefore, is contingent upon consumers' use of nutritional labels. It is possible that many individual diets fall short of the Dietary Guidelines because they do not use or care about nutritional information provided on food packages to help them in their food buying decisions (Nayga 1996). It is, therefore, important to know the factors affecting consumer's use of nutritional labels. Past research on the utilization of nutrition information has attempted to answer several key questions. Do consumers want nutrition information? Will they acquire nutrition information when making food purchase decisions? Having acquired the information, will they adequately understand and use it? Survey results showed that consumers do want nutrition information, would use it, and are willing to pay extra for it (Bender and Derby 1992; Jacoby, Chestnut, and Silberman 1977). Additional research has been done to identify sources of nutrition information and the factors that affect use of this information (Feick, Herrmann, and Warland 1986). A few studies have also been conducted to determine the factors that affect point-of-purchase use of nutrition labels as well as reasons for nonuse (Guthrie et al. 1995; Klopp and MacDonald 1981). Scant information, however, is available concerning label use by place of usage. For example, do consumers read the labels while shopping or at home? What type of consumers use labels while shopping and what type of consumers use labels at home? Do consumers use labels to compare brands of the same type of foods while shopping? These are the questions relevant to the present study. The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of socioeconomic, demographic, and health/nutrition related factors on label use while food shopping, at home, and when comparing brands. No other known study has examined this topic. The results of this study can be used for developing label education messages and materials. Knowledge of the relationship between sociodemographic characteristics and label use is useful in the design and implementation of nutrition information programs. For instance, sociodemographic factors can be used to tailor health interventions and marketing campaigns to specific population subgroups. Lin (1995) suggested that targeted consumer education is more efficient than generic programs in improving the general health of the nation. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The economic model of information search, introduced by Stigler (1961), is used as a framework to model nutrition label use. This framework assumes that the utilization of product information is an active process that involves searching out information. When making product choices, the consumer also must be able to evaluate the information obtained in the search and make decisions based on that evaluation (Senauer 1991). In this study, the use of nutrition labels was considered an act of consumer information search. …