Visualized Design Of Food Nutrition Labels Influences Customer’s Health Perception:An Eye-tracking Study

Food nutrition labels provide nutrition information of prepackaged food for people to make healthy food choice,however,the current design of nutrition labels in China is not well used.The State Council’s "opinions on implementing healthy China action"pointed out that the dietary structure of Chinese residents is high in oil,salt and sugar,which has serious impacts on health.If people can read nutrition labels efficiently,people may perform more healthy food choices.Different from the nutrition label systems in China,many visualized nutrition labels such as the Multiple Traffic Light System has been commonly used in European countries.The present study was designed to estimate whether the similar nutrition label system would show benefits for Chinese consumers in nutrition label processing.Health estimation task was used in the present study and eye movements were recorded.The present study is a 3(Label type:traditional nutrition fact panel,traditional nutrition fact panel+bar graph,traditional nutrition fact panel+bar chart+trafic light)x 2(Food healthiness:healthy,unhealthy)design.Participants need to make health judgement of each presented nutrition labels on a 7-point scale.In experiment 1,the meaning of the nutritive traffic light system was not informed to the participants before the experiment,and it was informed to the subjects before the experiment 2,so as to explore the influence of consumers’ background knowledge on health judgment.The results of Exp 1 showed that the reaction time of new visualized labels was faster than that of traditional labels.Healthiness judgement showed an interaction between label type and food healthiness.Subjects gave lower scores to unhealthy food under the condition of visualized labels.Eye movement data showed that subjects spent more time looking at the NRV(Nutrient Reference Values)region when viewing the bar chart+traffic light labels compared with traditional labels.Moreover,the fixation latency of NRV region is shorter for the two visualized label conditions than traditional labels.Compared to Expl,Exp2 showed similar results.The reaction time was faster and health score was lower to unhealthy food.Also,the average saccade amplitude was longer in Exp2.These results suggest that visualized nutrition fact labels attract consumers’attention and speed consumers’ healthiness judgement.Therefore,nutrition label designs should be emphasized by policy makers and manufacturers to improve consumers’ use of nutrition labels.Background knowledge also had a certain impact on consumers’ health judgments.The current study provides insights for improving the use and comprehension of nutrition labels,thus may potentially have significance for constructing healthy China.