Sustainability Facts Panel

Yesterday, Chipotle announced a new advertising campaign called “Real Foodprint.” As the video below shows, a new app reports on a number of environmental metrics (carbon, water, soil) for different Chipotle meals compared to “conventional” ingredients.

Without knowing much about their measurement approach, I am skeptical of Chipotle’s particular claims (for example, much of the research shows avoiding GMOs, hormones, or going organic increases carbon emissions, water use, etc. per unit of food produced). However, I like the overall idea of try trying to provide more objective/quantitative measures on sustainability.

A problem in our current market environment is that various labels (humane, “all natural” non-GM verified, organic, local) are (often incorrectly) interpreted by consumers to imply products are generally safer, healthier, or better for the environment than much of the research would suggest.

Probably one of my favorite opening lines of an academic paper is by Jonathon Schuldt and Norbert Schwarz entitled “The “organic” path to obesity? Organic claims influence calorie judgments and exercise recommendations”:

The point isn’t to pick on organic but simply to say that many labels and claims (and, well frankly a lot of marketing) can promote false beliefs (e.g., see this recent paper on redundant labels with Lacey Wilson). One way to try to counteract that is to try to provide more “objective” information. Most food products already carry this sort of information in the form of the Nutrition Facts Panel.

What if this approach was broadened to also include sustainability-related outcomes? Either a “sustainability facts panel” or a broadened “food facts panel.”

Such an approach would be more credible if monitored by a third party (rather than one company’s claims) and communicated in a form that was easily comparable across foods and brands. One hypotheses is that such “sustainability facts panels” might lessen the chance for “false beliefs” and “health halos” to emerge with more nondescript labels ; we currently have research planned to address this very question.

Conceptually, I like the idea of outcome-based reporting and labeling. However, there are a number of empirical challenges. I wrote about some of them back in 2015.

“In principle, it is possible to imagine something like a nutrition facts panel for environmental issues. However, the two are not as analogous as might first appear. First, scientists have a pretty good idea how to measure the fat, carb, and protein contents of food, whereas measuring C02 or deforestation impacts is tricky business with a lot of uncertainty. Moreover, the nutritional content of a processed food is relatively stable regardless of where the raw ingredients came from, which plant or facility was used to manufacture it, how it got to the store, or how you transported and cooked it. None of this would be true for an environmental label, which would require more more extensive (and more costly) monitoring and tracing, and if it is at all accurate, one could have two Wheaties boxes that are nutritionally equivalent but with very different environmental impacts. That may be all the more reason to inform consumers, but the point I’m trying to emphasize here is the much higher cost and greater uncertainty in informing about nutrition vs the environment. ”

As the science on these issues progresses, and as more digital information is collected on farms and transmitted up the supply chain, the likelihood of developing more uniform, credible sustainability facts panels increases.

Consumer Demand for Redundant Food Labels

That’s the title of a new working paper co-authored with Lacey Wilson. Here is the abstract:

“Previous studies, as well as market sales data, show some consumers are willing to pay a premium for redundant or superfluous food labels that carry no additional information for the informed consumer. Some advocacy groups have argued that the use of such redundant labels is misleading or unethical. To determine whether premiums for redundant labels stem from misunderstanding or other factors, this study seeks to determine whether greater knowledge of the claims - in the form of expertise in food production and scientific literacy - decreases willingness to pay for redundant labels. We also explore whether de-biasing information influences consumers’ valuations of redundant labels. An online survey of 1,122 U.S. consumers elicited preferences for three redundantly labeled products: non-GMO sea salt, gluten-free orange juice, and no-hormone-added chicken breast. Respondents with farm experience report lower premiums for non-GMO salt and no-hormone-added chicken. Those with higher scientific literacy state lower premiums for gluten-free orange juice. However, after providing information about the redundancy of the claims, less than half of respondents who were initially willing to pay extra for the label are convinced otherwise. Over 30% of respondents counter-intuitively increase their premiums, behavior that is associated with less a priori scientific knowledge. The likelihood of “overpricing” redundant labels is associated with willingness-to-pay premiums for organic food, suggesting at least some of the premium for organic is a result of misinformation.”

The figure below shows a key result. People place a $0 premium on non-GMO salt, gluten-free orange juice, and hormone-free chicken have significantly higher scientific literacy scores than people who place positive or negative premiums on these redundantly labeled products.

My State is Better than Yours: Competition between State Food Branding Programs

The journal Agribusiness just released a new paper I co-authored with Clint Neill and Rodney Holcomb. The work was motivated by the observation that every state in the U.S. has an agricultural marketing program aimed at promoting foods from their state. Examples include the “Taste NY” and “Pride of New York” programs as well as “Go Texan” and “California Grown.”

Our questions were two fold: 1) How much do consumers value products labeled with their state’s logo relative to other states’ products, and 2) what are the implications for state marketing programs?

We surveyed 6,900 consumers in an eight‐state contiguous region. For our application, we chose milk, and asked people which of several milk products with different state logos (and a regional or national brand) they preferred at different prices.

Not surprisingly, we find that consumers prefer products with their own state’s logo. For example, Texans’ average willingness-to-pay (WTP) for Texas milk is $4.14/gallon, but Texans’ value for milk from bordering states, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Arkansas only averaged $1.82, $2.65, and $2.72/gallon, respectively. There are a number of interesting patterns. Here’s an excerpt from the text:

“While each state’s consumers tend to prefer their own label and have a distinct order of preference for other states, the asymmetry between states is less clear. For example, Oklahoma consumers are willing to pay $2.84 for the Texas label but Texas consumers are only willing to pay $2.65 for the Oklahoma label, so there is an asymmetry of $2.84−$2.65 = $0.19. Thus, Oklahomans value the Texas label $0.19 more than Texans value the Oklahoma label.

Table 5 shows this type of asymmetry for all combinations. Interestingly, every other state’s consumers value the Colorado label more than Colorado consumers value other states’ labels. Alternatively, New Mexico consumers value all other state brands more than the other states’ consumers value the New Mexico label.”

While it is perhaps obvious that people in a state will tend to prefer their own products, it is also important to note that people have some value from agricultural products from other states (and, in fact, some small share of people prefer products from another state). The result is that state branding programs “steal” consumers from other states (the effect is a bit like the prisoner’s dilemma problem). The state branding program looks great if your the only state that has the program, but if all states have their own programs, the effects partially serve to cancel each other out. Here’s what we write about this so-called “beggar thy neighbor” effects:

“In the case of market shares, we were able to illustrate the large decreases as a group of producers from one state starts with having no state branded competitors to competing against several other brands within a region. Producers, ideally, would have a higher return if they were the only ones with a state label, but the optimal strategy for all agents in the region is to utilize a state label. Thus, the potential beggar‐thy‐neighbor scenario is possibly a Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, states who market their brand outside their borders are shown to have increased total market share”

For example, below is a graph showing what happens to demand for milk with a “Made in Oklahoma” label when no other states label their product (the green line with triangle markers) relative to what happens to demand for “Make in Oklahoma” milk when other states introduce their own labels (the red and blue lines). As the figure below shows, the market share more than halves when one state’s label has to compete with all the others in a region.

One potential solution (at least from the producer’s perspective) we discuss is for groups of states to band together and use a regional label.

Consumer perceptions of "healthy" claims

Last week I wrote about a study I conducted on how consumers think about the word “natural.” As a part of the same project, I also delved into consumer’s perceptions of the word “healthy.”

“Healthy”, at least as a food package claim, has been defined by the FDA since 1993 by reference to total fat content, with changes made in 2016 to discriminate between different types of fat. Recently, however, the FDA has begun a process to potentially re-define the term, suggesting the need for more information on consumer’s current perceptions of the term and labeling claim.

One of the first questions on this topic I asked my sample of over 1,200 nationally representative food consumers was an open-ended question: “What does it mean to you for a food to be called ‘healthy’?” A word cloud constructed from the responses is below (the full report is available here). Words like good, fat, nutrition/nutrient/nutritional, natural, sugar, calorie, and organic were most commonly mentioned. Responses provided some support for current FDA definition as “fat” is one of the most commonly mentioned words (mentioned by 10.4% of respondents), although nearly as many (6.6%) mentioned sugar. More than a quarter of respondents provided imprecise or tautological-like definitions like “good ingredients,” “good for you,” or “healthy ingredients.”

In addition to the open-ended question on the meaning of “healthy”, respondents were provided with a list of 13 factors that consumers might use to judge whether a food is healthy. The figure below shows that about a quarter of respondents indicated sugar content and use of hormones or antibiotics, 19.2% pointed to fat content, and 18.4% pointed to pesticide residues. The top four answers included two nutrients (sugar and fat) and two food production processes/ingredients (hormones and pesticides), suggesting consumers consider healthiness to be more than just defined by nutrient content. However, it should be noted that hormones and pesticides were infrequently mentioned (both mentioned by less than half a percent of respondents) when unaided.

To further explore how consumers define and think about healthiness, a couple binary choice questions were posed. Consumers were about evenly split on whether a food can be deemed healthy based solely on the foods’ nutritional content (52.1% believing as such) or whether there were other factors that affect whether a food is healthy (47.9% believing as such). Consumers were also evenly split on whether an individual food can be considered healthy (believed by 47.9%) or whether this healthiness is instead a characteristic of one’s overall diet and the combination of foods consumed (believed by 52.1%). These responses suggests difficulty in creating a definition of “healthy” on food packages that is broadly acceptable to consumers. Answers to these two questions are not determinative of each other, but rather there are four distinct consumer segments with regard to healthy food conceptions. The figure below indicating the percent of respondents who answered these two questions in the four possible manners.

Respondents were also provided a list of 15 foods in random order and were asked to indicate whether each was healthy, unhealthy, or neither healthy nor unhealthy. For each item, a healthiness score was created by subtracting the percent of respondents who considered a process unhealthy from the percent of respondents who considered a process healthy. The figure below shows the results.

Almost all respondents (96.2%) considered fresh vegetables to be healthy, and almost none (0.9%) considered them unhealthy, yielding a net healthy score of 96.2-0.9=95.3% for fresh vegetables. Fresh fruit, fish, eggs, and chicken were likewise broadly considered healthier than not. Frozen vegetables/fruit were considered less healthy than fresh, and canned were considered less healthy than frozen, although even canned was considered, on net, more healthy than unhealthy. Only three of the 15 items listed were considered by more respondents to be unhealthy than healthy: vegetable oil, bakery and cereal items, and particularly candy.

To explore how consumers conceptualized the healthiness of different foods, the questions used to create the figure above were further analyzed using factor analysis. The first factor, shown on the vertical axis of the following figure shows all animal products with high values and other non-animal products with lower values, suggesting consumers use animal origin as a primary factor in judging whether a food is healthy. Another factor illustrated on the vertical axis, indicates freshness or degree of processing is another dimension to healthiness evaluations. These results indicate that healthiness is not a single unifying construct, but rather consumers evaluate healthiness along a number of different dimensions or factors. A food, such as beef or fish, can be seen as scoring high in some dimensions of healthy but low in another.

Respondents were asked to indicate their extent of agreement or disagreement with eight statements. The highest levels of agreement were with the statement, “Individual needs determine whether various foods are healthy for an individual.” Only 7.8% of respondents disagreed with this statement, whereas more than 70% agreed with it. There were also strong beliefs that healthy food is safe to eat and natural. There was only moderate agreement that healthier food is tastier. About 44% of respondents neither agreed nor disagreed with this statement. There was slightly more disagreement than agreement that healthy food is more convenient to eat. A majority of consumers (58%) disagreed that healthy is more affordable.

There is a lot more in the full report.

What is "Natural"?

I recently completed a survey of over 1,200 U.S. consumers to find out exactly what they think “natural” means when evaluating different foods. The full report is available here and topline results for all questions asked are here (the survey also covered consumers’ perceptions of “healthy” claims, which I’ll blog on later).

Here is the motivation for the study:

“While food companies are allowed to use a “natural” label or claim, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has refrained from defining the term. One consequence has been a large number of lawsuits in recent years in which plaintiffs claim to suffer harm from being misled about food product contents or ingredients when accompanied with a natural label (Creswell, 2018). In 2015, the FDA requested public comment on the use of the term natural in food labeling, signaling a potential move to define the term. Such events suggest the need for more information about how food consumers perceive and define the term natural. ”

One of the initial queries was an open-ended question which asked, “What does it mean to you for a food to be called ‘natural’?” Here is a word cloud constructed from the responses.

Words like artificial, additive, chemical, and organic were most commonly mentioned. More than 10% of respondents specifically mentioned the word artificial. A non-trivial share of respondents suggested the word was meaningless, marketing hype, or that they did not know what the word meant.

Respondents were also provided a list of possible words/definitions and asked which best fit their definition of natural. No preservatives and no antibiotics/hormones topped the list.

Despite associating preservatives with lack of naturalness, when asked about specific preservatives, responses are more nuanced. Preservation by canning and with sugar/salt/vinegar were perceived by more people as natural than not-natural, whereas preservation with benzoates/nitrites/sulphites was not.

To hone in on which processes/foods people consider natural vs. not natural, they were shown the following figure. Respondents were asked “Which of the following foods or processes do you consider to be natural? (click up to 5 items on the image that you believe are natural).” The question was repeated except “natural” was replaced with “NOT natural.”

You can find some colorful heat-maps of the resulting clicks in the full report. Here, I’ll just note that about half of respondents (47.1%) clicked on the image of the raw commodities as being natural. The next most commonly clicked areas, chosen by between 20% and 30% of respondents, was grits/oatmeal, wash/clean, and wash/grind/slice. Even after showing the processes involved, 19.8% clicked vegetable oil as natural and 13.3% clicked flour as natural. By contrast, “Bleach” was most most frequently clicked (by 33.8% of respondents) as not natural, followed by “Crystalize”, and then alcohol, syrup, and sugar.

A curious result revealed is that, in many case, final foods are often considered more natural than the processes which make them. For example, more people clicked alcohol as natural than clicked fermentation as natural. Vegetable oil was perceived as more natural than pressing or bleaching, both processes which are used to create this final product. Similarly, sugar is perceived as more natural than crystallization, but of course, the latter is necessary to produce the former. These findings suggest that it is possible for a final product to be considered natural even if a process used to make the product is not.

I also asked questions about crop production processes and perceptions of naturalness.

About 80% more respondents said organically grown crops were natural as said such crops were not natural. Crops grown indoors and that are hydroponically grown were, on net, seen as more natural than not. All other crop production practices were rated as not natural by more respondents than were rated as natural. Thus, the results suggest consumers are skeptical of the naturalness of most modern crop production practices. Curiously, this is true for use of hybrid seeds. Crops produced with biotechnology were much more likely to be considered not natural than natural. Consumers perceived organic as natural, but not the pesticides used in organic agriculture or the methods (i.e., mutagenesis) used to create many organic seeds. Again, these findings suggest that it is possible for a final product to be considered natural even if a process used to make the product is not; in this case, the finding is likely to result from a lack of knowledge about organic production practices.

On the topic of misperceptions, just because a federal definition of natural exists does not mean consumers know or understand the definition. The USDA currently defines “natural” for meat products, and it is primarily defined as “minimally processed.” However, only about a quarter of respondents in this survey (26.6%) correctly picked this definition when asked how the USDA defines the term. More than 30% of respondents incorrectly believed the USDA definition of natural implies “no hormones” and 23.8% thought a natural label implies “no antibiotics.” These data suggest more than half of respondents are misled by the USDA definition of natural, a result supported by the other recent academic research.

There is a lot more in the detailed report, including more information on question wording and methods of analysis. For example, analysis of correlations between responses (via factor analysis), suggests “natural” is not a single monolithic construct in consumer’s minds, but rather is multidimensional. A food or process can be considered natural on one dimension but not another, as shown in the following figure.

Thanks to the Corn Refiners Association, who funded this survey. They gave me free reign to ask the questions and analyze the data as I wanted. You can see their interpretation of the results and their policy recommendations here.