Do nutrition labels sway shoppers? The impact on consumers’ food purchases
Nutrition labels are standard fixtures on food packaging. But reading them, making sense of the labels and their corresponding numbers can often be a tedious task. We asked shoppers how often do nutrition labels influence their purchasing decisions?
According to data from a YouGov Surveys: Serviced poll, such labels influence nearly one in five consumers’ purchasing decisions ‘very often’ (18%) and over a third (35%) of consumers’ decisions ‘fairly often’.
Three in ten consumers (30%) across 17 international markets say such labels influencer their purchases ‘not very often’, while a little over one in ten consumers (12%) say such labels on food products do not influence their purchases at all.
Nutrition labels on food products influence Indians and Indonesians the most; Germans, the least
Nearly three fourths of Indians (73%) and Indonesians (71%) polled say nutrition labels on food items influence their purchase decisions often - the most likely across markets to say so. Consumers in the UAE (69%) follow.
In Europe, although consumers in this region are less likely than their Asian counterparts to claim nutrition labels influence their purchases often, Italians (56%) lead.
More than half of all Americans (53%) say nutritional labels on food products influence their purchase decisions often. Nearly half of all Brits (47%) say the same.
Danes (40%) and Swedes (38%) are the most likely across markets to say nutrition labels on food products influence their purchase decisions ‘not very often’.
Nutrition labels have no impact on more than a quarter of Germans (27%), followed by Danes (17%), Brits (17%) and the French (16%). In the US, 14% of consumers say nutrition labels do not influence their purchases at all.
Also read:
Americans recognize unhealthy foods; what drives them to keep eating?
British consumers’ views of unhealthy foods and why they continue to eat them
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Methodology: YouGov Surveys: Serviced provide quick survey results from
nationally representative or targeted audiences in multiple markets. The data is based on surveys of adults aged 18+ years in 17 markets with sample sizes varying between 511 and 2051 for each market. All surveys were conducted online in June 2024. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from Mexico and India, which use urban representative samples, and Indonesia and Hong Kong, which use online representative samples. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Serviced.
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