Adding sodium information to casual dining restaurant menus: Beneficial or detrimental for consumers?

High sodium levels in restaurant food have prompted Philadelphia and New York City to require inclusion of sodium content in addition to calories on menus to “nudge” consumers toward lower sodium foods. However, taste perceptions may impact the effectiveness of this intervention. An online survey tested whether sodium and calorie menu nutrition information (MNI) influenced consumer choices from a casual dining restaurant menu, accounting for consumers’ intuition about taste of food relative to sodium, calories, and healthiness. Consumer choices were assessed based on calorie and sodium content of the menu items they selected. Participants were randomized to a menu with (1) calorie MNI only, (2) calorie plus numeric sodium MNI, (3) calorie MNI plus a sodium warning symbol for foods with 2300 mg of sodium or more, or (4) no MNI. Calorie plus numeric sodium MNI was associated with selection of meals lower in sodium compared to meals from the calorie MNI only menu or no MNI menu, but only for consumers with a taste intuition that (relatively) lower sodium, lower calorie, healthy foods were tasty. Consumers with the opposite taste intuition *(foods with these characteristics are not tasty) ordered meals higher in sodium. Inclusion of the sodium warning symbol did not result in a significantly different meal sodium content compared to the other menu conditions, regardless of taste intuition. However, differing levels of taste intuition alone, without consideration of MNI, was associated with ordering meals of significantly different calorie content. Overall, findings suggest adding calorie plus numeric sodium MNI may lead to beneficial outcomes (i.e., selecting meals lower in sodium) for some consumers and detrimental outcomes (i.e., selecting meals higher in sodium) for others, depending on their taste intuition.