Nutritional labelling is a means of communicating the nutritional content of food to consumers. When a nutritional label is salient and understandable, consumers tend to make more healthy choices. Nutritional labelling policies can also influence providers by incentivising manufacturers to...

In 2014, the United States Food and Drug Administration announced that chain restaurants with 20 or more locations would be required to put calorie labels on the menu. The merits of the policy depend in large part on three empirical issues: 1) if calorie labels help correct calorie under- or...

To examine whether four pre-selected front-of-pack nutrition labels improve food purchases in real-life grocery shopping settings, we put 1.9 million labels on 1,266 food products in four categories in 60 supermarkets and analyzed the nutritional quality of 1,668,301 purchases using the FSA...

Until recently, many restaurants and fast-food places did not offer nutrition information at the point of purchase. This is expected to change because the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires that nutrition information be posted in many of these venues. Once the law is fully...

Calorie labeling, an increasingly common policy intervention, has had mixed effects on consumer food choices. We show that visual salience of the calorie labels, rather than merely information content or format, is the key to reducing calorie. Our findings indicate that effective labeling, more...

We study the impact of mandatory calorie posting on consumers' purchase decisions, using detailed data from Starbucks. We find that average calories per transaction falls by 6%. The effect is almost entirely related to changes in consumers' food choices--there is almost no change in purchases of...

Traditionally, information has been assumed to never harm consumers, a notion recently challenged. Salience nudges have been argued to evoke negative emotions, therefore acting as “emotional taxes.” We analyze the emotional and short-term consumer welfare impact of a calorie salience nudge...

Consumers’ food preferences have led to a worldwide overweight rate of 35% in 2008. It is a matter of fact that overweight is closely linked to unhealthy eating habits. Most existing nutrition labels contain reference information in the form of aspirational levels such as the Percentage Daily...