Bridging the gap between healthy and sustainable diets (2020-2021)

Consumers are in favour of mandatory food labelling related to nutrition (Talati et al., 2019) and environmental sustainability labelling (BEUC, 2020; Eurobarometer, 2020). Correspondingly, one of the European Commission’s Farm-to-Fork strategy objectives is to create a harmonised food labelling framework that includes information about both the nutritional profile and environmental sustainability of food products. The idea is that information about healthy and sustainable food will facilitate healthy and sustainable food choices, which in turn is expected to reduce the incidence of non-communicable disease and the environmental impact of the food system, respectively (e.g., Stylianou et al., 2021; Willet et al., 2019).

However, there are different ways of informing consumers about healthy and sustainable diets, and not all of them are equally effective (e.g., European Commission, 2020). Thus, the overarching goal of this study is to investigate how to effectively communicate to consumers in Europe about healthy and sustainable diets in order to facilitate food choice, with consideration of heterogeneity of the European populations. As a means to this end, we first examined how consumers relate to healthy and sustainable diets and their information preferences regarding such diets in a semi-qualitative survey (Study 1) with 100 participants in France, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the UK. Consumers reported that they consider information about origin, nutrient content, and sensory properties of food when choosing healthy and sustainable food. They also wanted to know about a food’s origin, production information, food composition (e.g. ingredients) and environmental impact, and they preferred to receive information on food packaging or off-the-shelf. The reported that they would use such information to decide if to consume a particular product, or when choosing between two similar products.

Based on the results of Study 1, we then ran an online experiment where we provided consumers with various types of information about healthy and sustainable food and assessed their effect on the type and quantity of food they selected in a virtual shopping task (Study 2). 500 participants in each of the countries examined in Study 1 participated. Participants were exposed to either a) nutrition and environmental impact food labels of each product they saw, b) a general dietary recommendation about which foods were more or less healthy and sustainable (e.g. legumes more, red meat less), or c) both labels and the recommendation. The overall nutrition quality of participants’ shopping baskets improved when they saw the recommendation, but only those who already know how to eat sustainably improved the overall nutrition quality of their baskets in response to the labels. Neither the labels nor the recommendation improved the overall sustainability of people’s shopping basket.

The labels Influenced those more knowledgeable about healthy and/or sustainable eating to choose:

• more fruit,
• less meat,
• less vegetables,
• more sustainable products (scored A & B) and fewer less sustainable ones (scored E & D), and fewer less nutritious products (scored E & D)

The recommendation influenced those less knowledgeable about healthy eating to choose more fruit and less meat.

Check out our infographic, which summarises the results of this research:

Want to know more? Contact betty.chang@eufic.org