How Evaluative Nutrition Cues Promote Consumer Response for Unhealthy Foods

Consumers rely on nutrition labels to infer the healthiness of packaged foods, but many find it difficult to interpret them. This has led to the introduction of interpretive front-of-package (FOP) labels which provide the evaluation of the product's overall healthfulness (Newman, Howlett, and Burton 2016). A health star rating (HSR) is a good example of FOP labels; HSR evaluates the healthiness of foods from 0.5 (unhealthy) to 5 (healthy) stars. Placing FOP labels is voluntary; as it is not a mandate, only 16% of HSR-labeled products displays the ratings of 0.5 to 2.5 stars (Mhurchu, Eyles, and Choi 2017). This finding indicates that food manufacturers and marketers are unwilling to place such evaluative nutrition cues for unhealthy foods, presumably because displaying low ratings may undermine sales and brand image. In the current research, we observe how such evaluative nutrition cues influence consumer response to unhealthy foods. Nutrition labels not only assist consumers in making food choices but also facilitates access to health-related thoughts (Barreiro-Hurle, Garcia, and De-Magistris 2008). This suggests that the exposure to evaluative nutrition cues may offer individuals a greater access to health-related thoughts in unhealthy eating. Offering evaluative nutrition cues for unhealthy foods is also expected to lead consumers to make positive brand inferences. Specifically, the brand's decision to disclose negative product information (i.e., unhealthy) is expected to help consumers generate positive inferences about the brand and its commitment to consumer awareness (e.g., Isaac and Grayson 2017). Further, we argue that the proposed effect will be pronounced for consumers who believe that they are less (vs. more) knowledgeable about nutrition. As consumers lower in subjective nutrition knowledge (hereafter, SK) are more likely to need help in making food choices, they are more likely to appreciate the brand's decision to place evaluative cues on the front of package for unhealthy foods when other brands do not. As only a fraction of consumers believes that they are knowledgeable about nutrition (Goyal and Deshmukh 2018), it is worth investigating whether they exhibit favorable response to unhealthy foods accompanied by evaluative cues. Study 1 tested the hypothesis by observing individuals' actual product choice. Participants first reported their SK on nutrition (Moorman et al. 2004). We then introduced them to two chocolate granolas from mainstrea