The latest edition of our monthly Consumer Food Insights survey is now out.
We continue to see a fall both in the share of consumers who say they can’t find certain foods when shopping (i.e., stock-out rates are falling; see also my post last week on new research about stock-outs) and who are buying groceries online.
This month, we asked some questions about trust and importance of different food labels. Consumers said the most important labels were expiration date, ingredient list, and nutrition facts panel; the lase important were gluten free claims and religious certifications. Claims about “natural” and “healthy” were the least trusted.
We’ve been tracking trust in information about food from different organizations. In the past, we explicitly avoided listing Purdue, but we had been asking about two other universities: Harvard and Ohio State University (OSU). This month, we replaced OSU with Purdue. Purdue scored a +4, while OSU averaged -4 and Harvard averaged 7 over the past year. I’m not sure whether this means people think Purdue is more trustworthy than OSU, or that people are displaying some social desirability bias, since respondents know Purdue researchers are conducted the survey.
This month, we we broke down our results by employment status, comparing those consumers who are working age and retirement age, i.e., not working (ages 18-64), working (ages 18-64), working (ages 65+), and retired (ages 65+). We find, for example, that 27% of working age adults without a job experienced food insecurity in the last year compared to 12% among those with a job.
For these, and other results, check out the full report here.