Do People Want Calorie Labels on Menus?

On Tuesday evening, I was on air with Gil Gross who has a talk show on AM radio in San Francisco.  He wanted to talk about some research we recently published on menu-labeling.  I previously blogged about some of the results, but I wanted to re-mention something that came up during our talk.​

After discussing our finding that menus having only calorie information had no effect (they actually increased total calories ordered on average, though not significantly) and menus with a "traffic light" symbol had a small to moderate effect, the host asked whether people wanted these labels.  ​

Well, we actually asked precisely that question on a survey administered at the end of the meal.  ​Here is the exact phrasing of the question as it appeared on the 1-page survey.

We found 30.5% said they wanted a "menu with no nutritional information", 42% said they wanted a "menu with calorie contents of menu items listed", and only 27.5% said they wanted a "menu with a symbol to represent the calorie content of menu items."  ​

​So, curiously, the most popular option is the one that had zero effect (and if anything increased total calories).  The menu which actually lowered caloric intake was actually least preferred.  

On a last note, people sometimes take these kinds of survey questions to indicate what a business (or government) should do.​  That's not the right interpretation.  Just because consumers say they want labels doesn't mean it's good business (or good public policy) to provide them.  Labels cost money (and might change behavior in ways that cost money) that must be weighed against any benefits they provide.  Moreover, if consumers really want these labels, won't they frequent restaurants who voluntarily provide them?  Thus, there seems to be a clear incentive here for restaurants to provide the labels if they are truly demanded - and indeed many restaurants voluntarily do it already.  

No Need to Fear the Horse Meat Burger

Today, the Oklahoman (the largest newspaper in the state), ​ran an editorial I wrote on the European horse meat scandal.  I also touched on the consequences of the end of horse slaughter in the US.  Here are a few snippets:

An expanding European horse meat scandal has left many Americans wondering whether the same could happen here. Americans are unlikely to find a horse burger. Before celebrating, it might do some good to learn why.

Because horse slaughter ended in the US in 2007.  The consequences?

Unable to find a home for aged or crippled horses, ranchers faced high prices for euthanasia and disposal. Many horses were abandoned and left to starve. Investigations into horse abuse, for example, increased 60 percent in Colorado following slaughter cessation. Our research suggests that slaughter cessation caused a 36 percent drop in horse prices at a major Oklahoma auction and resulted in losses of $4 million per year in the yearling quarter horse market.

and

Americans are unlikely to find horse meat on their plate because we no longer produce any. It's possible that mislabeled products could be imported, but about 90 percent of the beef eaten by Americans is homegrown. If mislabeled products were found here, the answer wouldn't be, as we've seen, to ban horse slaughter. However much we are culturally predisposed to abhor eating horse, the reality is that it's safe and perfectly tasty. Just ask the French

and:​

. . . if a food retailer lies, there are legal remedies. The mere knowledge of liability, not to mention lost reputation, incentivizes truth telling. More vigilance might have stopped the faux beef sellers in Europe. But no government can prevent us from all harm. Nor should we want it to. Vigilance is costly and our governments are already doing too much.

in conclusion

The lesson from these equine scandals isn't necessarily that the government should have been doing more. Rather, politicians should learn what every good horse intuitively knows: Look before you leap.

Big Goverment and Small Potatoes

That was the tentative title of a chapter in my forthcoming book, Food Police, that ultimately wound up on the cutting room floor.  I spent a good portion of the book, and have many posts here on the blog, where I defend Big Food and Big Ag.  That's not because they are blameless or perfect, but because they are so often mischaracterized and are the scapegoats for many of societies perceived evils.  

But, it would be a mistake to think that food freedoms are threatened only by government regulation of Big Food and Ag.  In fact, one can often see the plain injustice at work when you look at the impacts of intrusive government regulations (and the crony capitalism sometimes promulgated by Big Food) on small potatoes - food trucks, farmers markets, and small operators just trying to make a buck.  I chose not to focus heavily on this in the book because they represent such a small part of our overall food economy, but I'm glad to see some attention being devoted to the issue.  

The American Enterprise Institute is hosting a conference title "Big government and big food vs. food trucks, foodies, and farmers markets."  Here's their promo:

If you like your food local, organic, or from a truck, government regulation might be your biggest obstacle. American restaurants lobby to choke off food trucks, and federal regulation of food safety leads to more consolidation in the industry. Moreover, farmers markets struggle to survive under the heavy hand of government.

What if food safety regulation is not about limiting the germs in our dinner, but is rather about limiting competition in America’s food industry? What if federal and local rules actually protect incumbent businesses instead of consumers?

​If you want to whet your appetite, I highly recommend this article from a few weeks back, entitled, Tea Party Libertarians and Small Organic Farmers Make Strange Political Bedfellows.  Here are some spinets:  

Laura Bledsoe didn't set out to join a political movement, she merely wanted to serve what she considered a sustainable meal.

In October 2011 she and her husband Monte decided they wanted to host what they called a "farm to fork" event in their home. They own a small farm 50 miles outside of Las Vegas.

then:​

Trouble began two days before the event was to take place. They received a call from the Southern Nevada Health District Office, who wanted to know if the farmers had secured a health permit for the event. "We didn't know we needed to," Laura says.

Then a health inspector came:​

The health inspector raised several concerns, but chief among them was the meat the Bledsoes were preparing to serve. Because the event was advertised as a "zero mile footprint," the meat hadn't been sent through a USDA processing plant, as is required for any meat purchased at a grocery store or restaurant, so the inspector deemed it illegal to serve.

The article tells several stories of a similar nature - check it out.​

Our Research on Menu Labeling

For the past couple years, I've been working with one of my former graduate students, Brenna Ellison at the University of Illinois, on some papers related to effects of calorie labels on menus (for those who may not be aware, "Obamacare" mandated that chain restaurants include such menu labels but the FDA has yet to release the final rules and implementation date).  

The first part of that research was finally published last week in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, where we report on a smaller sample from the larger study which includes the group of people Brenna interviewed after they ordered.  The results have been picked up by a couple news outlets, including this one from Reuters: 

Showing diners how many calories are in restaurant food items may influence how much they eat - especially among the least health-conscious people, a new study suggests.

That's true - but only partially true.  We find that the numeric labels mandated by "Obamacare" do not have a statistically significant effect on the number of calories people order.  The labels that we find to be (somewhat) effective are stop-light labels, in which we put a red dot next to the high calorie foods, a yellow dot next to the medium calorie foods, and a green dot next to the low-calorie foods.  As the story suggests, the labels are less influential among people who we rate (based on their survey answers) as health conscious.  The result isn't terribly surprising - people who are health conscious are probably already familiar with the caloric content of the foods they eat, and as such, adding labels are unlikely to provide new information.  Still, we'd want to know something about the cost of the label to know whether the policy was a net-plus (this is an issue we take up in our other papers still in the works).    

The result I found most interesting from the whole study was only discussed in the conclusions (and was missed all together in the news story) is the following:

Interestingly, despite the calorie+traffic light label’s effectiveness at reducing calories ordered, it was not the labeling format of choice. When asked which of the three labeling formats was preferred, only 27.5% of respondents said they wanted to see the calorie+traffic light label on their menus. Surprisingly, 42% preferred the calorie-only label which had virtually no influence on ordering behavior. These responses imply diners may want more information on their menus (the number of calories), yet diners do not want to be told what they should or should not consume (i.e., green = good, red = bad).

Fast Food Restaurants Getting Healthier

One of the reasons I’m often critical of government policies that attempt to force healthy eating on the public (say through ingredient bans or fat taxes) is that I have a different view of “Big Food” than many foodies.  Big Food is often portrayed as powerful, nefarious entity preying on helpless consumers.  I’m more apt to seeing fast food restaurants as responding to consumer demand for convenient, inexpensive, quick food.  They offer burgers and fries because this is what consumers are willing to pay for. 

However much we may want McDonald’s et al. to offer healthier alternatives, at the end of the day they must make enough money to stay afloat.  If more salads are offered than consumers want or are willing to buy, that’s a recipe for disaster.  As one organic farmer put it: the first rule of sustainability is that you have to make enough money this year to do it all over again next year.  I have little doubt that the McDonalds of the world would offer a lot more salads if they thought they could make money doing it. 

Against this backdrop, I noticed a recent study by the Hudson Institute that examined the offerings of fast-food restaurants over the past five years (it was covered by the WSJ here).  Here’s what the study found:

“between 2006 and 2011, lower-calorie foods and beverages were the growth engine for the restaurants studied. In 17 of the 21 restaurant chains evaluated, lower-calorie foods and beverages outperformed those that were not lower-calorie. In addition, chains that increased their servings of lower-calorie items saw positive returns as a result. These chains generated:

• a 5.5 percent increase in same-store sales, compared with a 5.5 percent decline among chains selling fewer lower-calorie servings;
• a 10.9 percent growth in customer traffic, compared with a 14.7 percent decline; and
• an 8.9 percent increase in total food and beverage servings, compared with a 16.3 percent decrease.”

The lesson is that you don’t always need government regulation.  The market will deliver healthy foods when the public decides that’s what they want.