Winning paper is food for thought

massey-university

Wed Jun 03 2009 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)

Winning paper is food for thought

Wednesday, 3 June 2009, 12:48 pm
Press Release: Massey University

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Massey University marketing PhD researcher Ninya Maubach has scooped two awards at a marketing conference in the United States.

She won the best student paper prize and the Brenda M. Derby Memorial Award at the American Marketing Association’s 20th Anniversary Marketing and Public Policy Conference, in Washington DC, at the weekend.

Ms Maubach carried out three studies that found colour-coded labels were a better way of communicating nutritional information on food than the percent daily intake label preferred by the Food Industry Group. Ms Maubach, supervised by professors Janet Hoek (now at the University of Otago) and Phil Gendall and Dr Tim McCreanor, investigated how nutrition formats affected consumers’ reactions to foods with differing nutritional profiles.

The research, supported by a grant from the New Zealand Cancer Society and presented at the conference, compared the standard nutrition information panel with two new front-of-pack labelling formats - a percent daily intake label, already voluntarily adopted by some food manufacturers and colour-coded traffic light labels, which use red, amber or green to rate nutrient density.

The first two experiments surveyed more than 700 New Zealand parents and found that the traffic light label helped consumers to differentiate between products with healthy and less healthy nutrition profiles.
“Consumers’ overall attitudes to two children’s breakfast cereals were very similar when a percent daily intake label was used, even though the cereals’ nutrition composition differed,” says Ms Maubach. “When a traffic light label was used, respondents had significantly more negative attitudes to the less healthy cereal.”

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A third experiment found that consumers’ choices were strongly influenced by the presence of nutrition and health claims, even when the product had a high fat and sugar content. This effect was reduced when a traffic light label was present, which also suggests consumers find this format easier to use.

Ms Maubach says: “If policy makers expect consumers to make healthy choices for their families, they need to provide nutrition information in a format that consumers can understand quickly in busy supermarket environments. Industry groups support widespread introduction of percent daily intake labels, yet this research shows that an alternative labelling system seemed better.”

Brenda M. Derby was a social scientist with the United States Food and Drug Administration and was well known in the consumer research and public policy community. The award was set up to honour a deserving graduate student.
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