Food choices: Testing the consumer’s point of view

A promising research method helps manufacturers and policymakers identify what shoppers look at on product packaging and labels.

It is estimated that two in every five Americans will be diagnosed with diabetes in their lifetime and that 93.3 million adults in the United States are clinically obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Such conditions put people at risk for heart disease, cancer, and other serious health issues, but they can be controlled with healthier eating habits and regular exercise.

To help consumers make more educated decisions about food, the FDA set new guidelines for nutrition food panels (NFP) on packaged food products. Calories and the number of servings in a package will now appear in larger, boldface type, and daily values and added sugars have been updated, among the addition of other nutritional information.

“We have a high share of obesity, and one of the reasons we think is that people make unhealthy food choices because they do not notice the calorie content on a product,” says Associate Professor of Food Industry Management Carola Grebitus, whose research interests span agribusiness and food science. “If the NFP is revised to better catch people’s attention, then we would hope that consumers would make healthier choices.”

The FDA is requiring food manufacturers to adopt the new NFP, and while large manufacturers still have another year to transition to the new label, some have already made the switch.

Will the revised nutrition label help people make better food choices and consequently lead to a healthier American population? It’s too early to tell. In fact, it will be years before researchers can truly gauge the results and even then, the data collected may be far from accurate. It’s one thing to survey consumers about what they think they were looking at when viewing a particular product package, but do they really remember exactly what they saw, or attended to, first?

In sight and mind

To find out what elements of product packaging a person looks at and in what order they view it, researchers like Grebitus use a method called eye tracking. State-of-the-art computer equipment and software track a person’s visual attention to pictures on a computer screen or in a store, using a special device. The eye tracker identifies exactly what the viewer looks at and when, something that the viewer often doesn’t even realize themselves.

In their paper, “Change is good? Analyzing the Relationship Between Attention and Nutrition Facts Panel Modifications,” published in Food Policy in 2017, Grebitus and co-author George C. Davis, a professor at Virginia Tech, describe their research using eye tracking to preliminarily test the effectiveness of the new nutrition label.

Participants viewed different food products on a computer screen. “Half viewed products with the new label and the other half viewed products with the old label,” Grebitus explains. The results were “asymmetric,” depending on the product.

“For healthier items, more attention is paid to the modified [new] NFP than to the current NFP,” the team concludes. “For less healthy items, less attention is paid to the modified NFP than to the current NFP.” 

The bottom line? “It seems that people try to avoid the nutrition information for cookies and chips,” Grebitus says. The takeaway from their study is that a single modified design to the NFP may not yield uniform results, and further revisions may be necessary. But Grebitus is optimistic.

“I hope that it could make people healthier,” she says. “We have calorie labeling in a lot of restaurants now, and when you see the calories, you realize if I have this chocolate mocha latte that has 1,000 calories, that’s a lot! If I am supposed to have 1,800 calories a day, maybe I shouldn’t drink the whole thing.”

Eye tracking can help researchers study what consumers notice when they make a food choice, and thus can help the FDA make further changes to the NFP to ensure that the information is presented in a way in which it is most likely to be noticed.

A promising research method for economics and policy research

While eye tracking has been used for a long time, it is relatively new in the agribusiness and economics space.

“Eye tracking has been around for a long time,” Grebitus says. “Years ago, it was used by NASA when astronauts went into space. It has other uses in psychology and marketing but just recently, it’s been used in economics.”

Part of the reason for the delay is that highly accurate eye-tracking machines are quite costly. Another is that researchers literally sit with subjects one by one to show them pictures and capture results. If 115 people are participating in a study, that means roughly 115 hours will be required to get the job done, she explains. And there’s a learning curve to get researchers up to speed on how to use the complex equipment. Grebitus worked with a trainer who led her through a project for nearly a year so she could learn the ropes.

How effective is product advertising?

One example of how eye tracking has helped marketers and product developers is a Jeep ad. “There was a car, a woman, some text, and a tiny tag on the car that said ‘Jeep,’” Grebitus says. “When they used eye tracking, they found that people looked at everything except the Jeep sign, so basically the consumer leaves the page without knowing what brand the car it was. That’s a problem from a marketing perspective.”

The eye tracking data revealed important information on how the car manufacturer can modify its advertising to ensure that the brand element is viewed.

When participants of another study were shown two different ads for diapers — one with a baby looking directly at the camera and the other with a baby looking to the side. Eye tracking revealed that viewers only looked at the baby but not at the product name in the first ad. In the second ad, viewers noticed the brand name. “In the first ad, the viewers were too distracted by the cute baby looking directly at them,” Grebitus explains.

An eye toward shelf space

Eye tracking has become an important tool in the food industry because it can reveal which product labels on a shelf consumers look at most. “That’s why companies pay money to be in certain spots in the grocery store,” she says. The most expensive location? The end of the aisle you walk around to get to the next aisle.

A matter of preference

Today’s consumers want more information because they are making food choices based on selective preferences, particularly when it comes to produce. Some people want to know that what they’re eating is organically grown, non-GMO, grown domestically or from a certain country of origin, or produced by fair trade organizations.

“The organic certification costs a lot of money, and we label these products so consumers can trust that they are truly organic,” Grebitus says. “We need to know that people really look at that information.”

Most recently, Grebitus and four scholar-colleagues reviewed existing research on eye tracking to consider future applications that can be explored by agricultural and food economists. Their paper, “On the Measurement of Consumer Preferences and Food Choice Behavior: The Relation Between Visual Attention and Choices,” published in 2018 in the journal Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy essentially studied other studies and concluded that eye tracking can help researchers examine the effect of attention on information processing, preference, and choice behavior. 

A key takeaway from their study is that eye tracking could provide a baseline to assess the reliability of experimental data and validate it. “This is crucial for both business applications as well as policy and welfare analysis,” Grebitus says.

Although eye tracking is new to economics and policy-making, it stands to make an important contribution to research that can potentially improve the health of millions.