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.

The Superbowl and Chicken Wing Demand

With the Superbowl coming up this Sunday, I thought I’d take a quick look at whether this annual event has much effect on the market for a food it has come to be closely associated with: chicken wings.

I turned to USDA data compiled by the Livestock Marketing Information Center, which reports weekly prices on whole wings going back to 1992. Here is the price trend in nominal terms. There has been a strong upward trend in chicken wing prices over this time period, but of course some of that is due to inflation. However, even after adjusting for inflation, wings were about $0.90/lb in the early 1990s ($0.50/lb in nominal terms), and they averaged about $1.50/lb in 2018; during the latter part of 2018, prices were above $2.00/lb.

In the graph above, it’s hard to make out when, exactly, the Superbowl occurred. Looking at the history of the event over this time period, the Superbowl occurred in late January or early February every year since 1992. With that knowledge, I added orange lines to the graph to indicate the periods surrounding the Superbowl.

It sure looks like there is a price spike right around the time of the Superbowl each year, with a price decline immediately following. Indeed, if I look at the most recent decade, prices rise about 7% from early January to the Superbowl period (late January, early February), and then fall about 5% going in to mid- to late-February.

The price spikes are indicative of increasing demand over this time period. This is also consistent with data we collected in the monthly Food Demand Survey, were we often found a spike in consumer willingness-to-pay around the event.

Too bad I don’t have data on napkins and antacids …

P.S. One might wonder why this price phenomenon is different than that for turkeys. As I discussed back in November, turkey prices tend to fall around Thanksgiving when demand is peaking, perhaps due to strategic pricing behavior by retailers or from producers planning ahead and increasing supply around this time. A key difference with turkeys and wings, is that one is a whole and the other is a part. If there isn’t an overall demand increase for chicken around the Superbowl, then the wings will be in relatively short supply. It might make sense for a turkey producer to grown a whole bird in anticipation of the holidays, but it’s not possible for a producer to only grown wings in anticipation of the Superbowl.

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.

Crop Yields and Taste

That modern agriculture is incredibly productive - much more than the past - is undeniable. These USDA data, for example, suggest we produce about 170% more agricultural output now than in the late 1940s. I have argued that these these increases in agricultural productivity are signals of improved sustainability. Some people believe the the productivity improvements have been accompanied with offsetting externalities or degredations in animal welfare. A different kind of critique is that modern crops - despite being more productive - aren’t as high “quality.” For example, this piece in Politico by Helena Bottemiller Evich, titled “The great nutrient collapse” discuses evidence that vitamin content of crops has fallen as yields have increased, and there is the often-heard complaint that tomatoes don’t taste as good as they once did.

There is some biological basis for these latter concerns. If a crop breeder selects plants for higher yields, they are selecting plants that are spending their energy and nutrients into producing bigger seeds and fruits, which is energy that could have gone (in lower yielding plants) to growing leaves or roots or other compounds that affect taste and vitamin content.

I had these thoughts in the back in my mind when I came across the Midwest Vegetable Trial Report put out by researchers at Purdue and other Midwestern universities. The report compares different vegetable varieties in terms of yield and other output characteristics. I noticed for a couple vegetables - green beans and sweet corn - there were also measures of taste for each variety. Granted, these were not full-on scientific sensory evaluations and they involved small numbers of tasters, but still I thought it would be useful to test the conjecture that higher yielding varieties taste worst.

Some researchers from University of Kentucky put together the green bean report. They compared the performance of 19 different varieties of green beans. The most productive variety (named “Furano”) yielded 785 bushels over six harvests, whereas the lowest yielding variety “Slenderette” only produced 233 bu/acre in six harvests. As the image below reveals, however, there was only a weak correlation between taste and yield. The correlation was negative (-0.26), but not particularly large. About 6.6% of the variation in yield is explained by taste. The best tasting variety “Opportune“ had a taste score of 4.1 (on a 1=poor to 5=excellent scale) and a yield of 557; the worst tasting variety “Bronco” had an average taste score of 2.3 and a yield of 543. So, the best tasting bean had better yield than the worst tasting bean. Overall, the results below provide some weak support for a yield, taste trade-off.

The report also provided production and taste data on supersweet corn (this part was authored by Purdue researchers Elizabeth Maynard and Erin Bluhm). They compared 16 different types of bicolored supersweet corn (they also evaluated two varieties of white and two varieties of yellow, which I’m ignoring here). They had tasters rate “flavor” on a 1 to 5 scale. As the figure below shows, there is actually a positive correlation between flavor and yield, as measured by ton/acre. The correlation is 0.15, but the relationship is weak. The authors also report yield in a slightly different way, ears/acre, and by this measure the correlation is slightly negative (-0.09).

These results don’t necessarily negate the idea that the taste of vegetables has declined over time as higher yielding varieties have been adopted, but they do suggest that in 2017, among the particular varieties tested and among the few tasters asked, there is only a very weak correlation between taste and yield for green beans and supersweet corn.

Arbitraging the Market for Food Fears

A couple weeks ago, the best selling author Michael Lewis was on campus, and I went to listen to him talk. I’ve read several of Lewis’ books, and it was interesting to hear him talk about some of the underlying themes that united them.

In his 2017 book, the Undoing Project, Lewis writes the history of Kahneman and Tversky and the development of behavioral economics, a field that posits people do not always make rational decisions. In an earlier book, Moneyball (published in 2004), a few stat/econ types realized baseball teams were leaving money on the table by ignoring data on what really drives team wins. One team manager, Billy Beane, attempted to arbitrage the market for players by buying “undervalued” players and putting them to higher-valued use. In another earlier book, the Big Short (published in 2010), Lewis talks about the people who made big bucks on the financial crisis by recognizing that markets were “mispricing” the risks of systemic mortgage failures. In some ways the books are out of order because Lewis’s earlier books described how various people made serious money from the sorts of behavioral biases that Kahneman, Tversky, and others uncovered.

What’s this got to do with food?

Many of the systematic biases that lead people to mis-price baseball players and mortgage-backed securities are likely leading people to mis-price foods made with new technologies. Take GMOs. A Pew study found 88% of scientists but only 37% of the public thought GMOs are safe to eat. Is it possible scientists are wrong and the public is right? Sure, but if you had to place a bet, where would you put your money?

Or, let’s take at a widely studied behavioral bias - the tendency for people to exaggerate the importance of low-probability risks. The propensity to overweight low probability events was one of the cornerstones of prospect theory, which was introduced by Kahneman and Tversky. This theory is sometimes credited as herding the birth of modern-day behavioral economics, and the paper was a key contributor to Kahneman later winning a Nobel Prize. If there is a 1% chance of an outcome occurring, when making decisions, people will often “irrationally” treat it as a 5% or 10% chance. There are many, many studies demonstrating this phenomenon.

Oddly, I have never seen a behavioral economists use this insights to argue that fears over growth hormones, GMOs, pesticides, preservatives, etc. are overblown. However, there are many food and agricultural scientists who argue that many of our food fears are, in fact, irrational in the sense that public perceptions of risk exceed the scientific consensus.

Now, getting back to Michael Lewis’s books on the people who figured out how to profit from behavioral biases in fields as divergent as baseball players and mortgage-backed securities, if we really think people are irrationally afraid of new food technologies, is it possible to put our money where our mouth is? Or, buy fears low and sell them high?

Here are a few half-baked thoughts:

• If people are worried about the safety of food ingredients and technologies, shouldn’t they be willing to buy insurance to protect against the perceived harms? And if consumers are overly worried, they should be willing to pay more for insurance than it actually costs to protect against such harms. If we believe this is the case, then creating insurance markets for highly unlikely outcomes should be a money-making opportunity. On the plus side, such markets might also take some of the fear out of buying foods with such technologies since people can hedge their perceived risks.

• Let’s say your Monsanto (now Bayer), Syngenta, BASF, or another seed/chemical company. What can you do to assuage consumers’ fears of your technologies, particularly if you believe the perceive risks are exaggerated? Why not offer up a widely publicized bond that will be held in trust in case some adverse event happens within a certain period of time? (This is like when contractors or other service suppliers attempt to gain trust by being bonded). If it is really true that consumers’ fears are exaggerated, the bond won’t be paid out (at least not in full), and will revert back to the company.

• Did you know that it is possible to invest in lawsuits? Investors, whose money is used to front the legal bills, earn a portion of the payout if a plaintiff wins a settlement against a corporation or other entity responsible for some harm. The “price” of such investments is likely to rise the greater the public’s perceived odds of winning the case, which presumably related to perceptions of underlying risks. I can imagine institutions or markets arising that would enable investors to short such investments - to make money if the plaintiff losses the case. The current Monsanto-glyphosate verdict not withstanding, shouldn’t it be the case that one could profitability short lawsuits surrounding the safety of food and farm technologies if the fears around them are indeed overblown?

Other ideas?