AN EXPLORATION INTO INDIAN’S PERCEPTION ON FOOD PRODUCTS NUTRITIONAL LABELING

Healthy eating helps improve our health and reduce the risk of many chronic diseases .Labeling is an important component of product package. Food labels found on most pre-packaged food and drinks give important information to help us make healthy choices. The nutrition facts label is a label required on most packaged food in many countries. This paper examined the students‟ perception towards nutritional labeling in a South Indian context through personal interviews of 220 respondents using a structured questionnaire. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Shapiro-Wilk and Box plot jointly revealed that there was no normality in the distribution of the data for the identified questionnaire components. Kruskal Wallis test which was performed to identify the various dimensions among a set of nutritional labeling parameters using sex and age of the respondents as the grouping variable revealed that there were no significant differences in the perception of nutritional labeling of packed food products.