Project

Transparent, healthy & sustainable

In a joint research project Wageningen University and the University of Groningen and work together with leading Dutch retailers on understanding what it takes to make healthier and more sustainable food choices in (online) stores.
The project focusses on developing interventions that support healthy and sustainable choices by increasing the transparency and actionability of in-store information.

Background

From a social as well as an individual perspective, it is important that purchasing patterns become healthier and more sustainable. Although information about healthfulness and sustainability of choice alternatives in (online) stores is abundant, the actual attention to and effective use of such information by consumers is quite limited. The consumer needs to:

  1. Understand the information (i.e. transparency);
  2. Be able and willing to act upon the knowledge (i.e. actionability).

Project description

The aim of the research project is to fundamentally understand consumers’ (non-) use of information and to apply and validate those insights to build and test consumer-relevant decision support systems (ranging from information salience and transparency to hand-held information and decision tools) that can overcome the neglect of societally relevant information at point of purchase.

Results

Subproject 1: The aim of this subproject was to provide a theoretical framework on barriers of FOP nutrition label use and how supporting interventions could address these barriers. The theoretical framework integrates existing information-processing and behavioural MOA frameworks into one overall theoretical framework. Nutrition label provision alone is a necessary yet insufficient condition for behaviour change to occur. Individuals need to:

  1. Understand the information (i.e. transparency);
  2. Be able and willing to act upon the knowledge (i.e. actionability).

Supporting interventions may be able target barriers that hinder this process. A systematic literature review was carried out to integrate existing evidence about which interventions can support nutrition labels.