סקירה – האם ברירות מחדל ירוקות מפחיתות צריכת בשר?

Traffic-light labels (red, yellow and green) next to menu items can reduce meat sales, if only for a short time.

Originally published on Faunalytics.

Traditionally, policymakers have tried to change peoples’ food habits trough restricting access to or limiting the marketing of certain foods, providing people with information and education, or economic incentives to change food habits.  However, such interventions have unclear effects on people’s actual food choices. According to behavioral economics, many daily decisions are fast, intuitive and occur outside cognitive awareness. Changing the food environment and presentation of food options may therefore influence customers’ food choices without removing options or changing economic incentives. 

In the past, scientists have examined labeling in the context of calorie counting. Two reviews argued that simple traffic-light labels, or labels that simply identify the best option, attract more attention than detailed labels. In those studies, researchers argued that traffic-light labels work well because consumers intuitively grasp the implicit messages of the relative colors and can compare options within the same category. 

Another stream of research has studied how introducing a third option influences preferences, also called the compromise effect. The compromise implies that the middle option becomes more attractive or popular when a smaller or larger option is introduced, compared to when only the two extremes are available. In a calorie labeling study, customers avoided the largest and smallest caloric items and chose the items in-between. In another study, the middle size became more likely to be purchased when a larger and a smaller drink size option was added to the range of choices. 

Therefore, it’s hypothesized that traffic light labels could lead to an increase in purchases of the middle option. In this study, researchers thought that single positive signs such as a green label could communicate that an option is positive, while a red sign can imply a negative warning. An additional major gap in the literature is if simple food labels work overtime in settings where customers are exposed to labels multiple times. Some have argued that customers develop “fatigue” for labels when exposed to them multiple times, and that labels stop working after time and repeated exposure. For these reasons, the researchers say that it’s important to determine the impact of eco-labels on real food purchases over time.

In this study, three different labeling systems were tested on warm dishes in the largest cafeteria at the University of Oslo. The first system was traffic-light labels with three symbols (red, yellow and green), the second system was a single-green label that only labeled the most environmentally-friendly dishes, and the third system was a single-red label that only labeled the least environmentally-friendly option. 

For the single-green labeling format, only the vegetarian dish was labeled with the “Low CO₂” sign. In contrast, the single-red labeling format exclusively marked the meat dish with a “High CO₂” label. Posters were placed around the cafeteria, explaining the labeling systems and the climate impact of different food categories, but customers were not forced to read them. Outcome was measured by the sales share of meat, fish and vegetarian dishes. The intervention period was separated in two; the first 20 days (period 1) took place before Christmas holidays, and the next set of 22 days (period 2) took place after Christmas holidays.

The results were promising: the traffic-light labels reduced sales of dishes with land animals by 9% in period 1 but not in period 2. Overall sales share of fish or vegetarian dishes were not impacted. Single-green and single-red labeling had no effect on sales share of meat, fish or vegetarian dishes in period 1, nor in period 2.

Based on these results, the researchers concluded that a traffic-light label, in combination with information – in this case, posters – can reduce the consumption of land animals, at least in the short-term. The results suggest that the traffic-lights led to a switch from red choices to the yellow middle option: sales of the green-labeled vegetarian dish did not increase as much as sales of the middle yellow labeled fish dish. 

We can interpret it as support for the compromise effect, meaning that the traffic-light labeling led to an increase of the middle option, and not to a switch to the more “extreme” green option. If that is so, we assume that offering a plant-based option as the middle option (such as tofu or as opposed to two extremes: meat on the one hand and vegetables on the other hand) should have the same effect, swaying potential animal food consumers to the plant-based middle option. 

Another interpretation of the same result might be that meat-hungry consumers prefer fish proteins to pure vegetarian meals, and that the meat and fish dishes were considered more similar to each other than a vegetarian dish. If that is the case, we can assume that people won’t switch to the plant-based middle option and that we’ll need a different intervention. 

Customers seemed to react favorably to the traffic-light label when first introduced, but their eco-friendly behavior declined over time and almost returned to the control period behavior after some months during period 2. These results could be evidence for customers developing “fatigue” for labels, and that the effect of the ecolabels in this study was only relatively short-lived. A notable strength of the study is that the researchers measured changes in actual purchase choices, rather than relying on self-reported behavior. In summary, as meat consumption has a significant negative environmental footprint, and more traditional policy interventions do not fully seem to capture peoples’ motivations when choosing what to eat, behavioral economics interventions can be a relevant future area of research and action.

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Originally posted on Faunalytics

Different ways of framing plant-based products can provoke different mental associations. This study looks at three different framings, and the further concepts and ideas they invoke.

One of the things that makes communicating a pro-veg*n food message so challenging is knowing that different people are driven by different motives. What’s more, different ways of framing a product could provoke different mental associations, which is important, because research has shown that the more associations a concept provokes, the faster information flows and is absorbed. More specifically, “being able to understand which type of communication activates which type of information in consumers’ memory [is] a competitive advantage for marketing communication efforts.”

This study sought to explore this subject further by studying how consumers react to three different framings of plant-based foods: sustainability framing, health framing, and information about substituted ingredients. 90 participants were recruited and roughly divided into three groups who would dive deeper into each framing. The participants were guided through the process of making concept maps and then interviewed further about their word choices and associations. 

For their part, the researchers were looking at the responses – and the importance of the different concepts in question – through a series of analytical lenses: Is your concept a lone wolf? Does the concept make you think of many other concepts quickly?How close are the concepts? How far in terms of number of links you have to go to get from your concept to another? Does a concept fall between two unrelated concepts? Does it make other concepts that were unrelated to each other suddenly “talk”, the way the word “bank” links the world of money and the world of rivers? If your concept is taken away, does it leave an empty hole behind it? 

Analyzing the results of these mind maps and interviews, the researchers found some similarities across groups. Firstly, regardless of group, people linked a plant-based diet with health, and most of those associations were positive. They also found that the processing of food was an issue, as well as the negative perception of the ingredients needed for it – people tended to be concerned about unnaturalness and “chemicals” associated with plant-based food subtitutes. 

They also found some differences. People in the ingredient substitution group thought of fewer associations for that concept. Although substitution is a part of the trend of products that are transparent about the precise substitute ingredient, health and sustainability are the most common reasons people go veg*n. This analysis showed that talking about substituted ingredients may be a non-starter. Finally, the ingredient group directly linked to the concept of food being “expensive,” which was not present in the other groups.

Ultimately, the study was conducted to better understand how marketers could reach consumers. However, since many animal advocates find themselves in the position of “marketing” a veg*n lifestyle, the results can be picked up and used by advocates as well. Overall, the researchers found that framing a product in terms of health and sustainability leads to richer and more complex mental associations than simply communicating about substituted ingredients; furthermore, while health framing leads to product-centered associations related to things like nutritional quality and chemicals, framing a product in terms of sustainability leads to broader associations about the environment and authenticity. While it’s unlikely that many advocates would be able to conduct their own research in this vein, even these results taken on their own could be useful in future campaigns.

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