Role of claim and product information in perceived healthiness, appealingness and likelihood to buy

M. Vassallo*1, A. Saba1

1INRAN – Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca sugli Alimenti e la Nutrizione, Rome, Italy
vassallo@inran.it


The objective of this study is to understand how consumers, in different European countries, perceive health-related messages presented as verbal claims or pictorial symbols attached to the cereal-based products or non-cereal products containing beneficial compounds from grains in terms of appeal, healthiness and willingness to buy.

A sample of 2307 members of the public was randomly recruited in Finland (n=529), Germany (n=501), Italy (n=638), and UK (n=529) (data from Health-Grain Project). The participants were over 35 years old consumers, solely or jointly responsible for the family’s food shopping, with equal quotas for men versus women. The target of recruitment was to have respondents with a subgroup that represented average adult consumers and a subgroup of subjects familiar (personally or having familiar members or close acquaintance) with diabetes type 2 or difficulties in balancing blood glucose levels. The participants completed a self-reported questionnaire which included a section based on a orthogonal conjoint design, and a section measuring variables related to dual-processing model. Cluster Analysis was carried out on the path-worth utilities (carried out from the conjoint task) of all the three categories of the attribute claim for the variable “likelihood to buy”.

The cluster analysis confirmed the presence of three main patterns of reaction towards health claims on food labels:  subjects who were positive towards reduction disease risk claims,  sceptical towards health claims, and positive towards promoting well-being of claims.

The results suggest that some geographical differences exist in the perception of appealing and willingness to buy functional foods with health claims on labels, maybe due to different cultures, traditions and habits related to eating behaviour. The acceptance of functional foods and health claims would depend mainly on the carrier product, confirming that health claims on labels should be designed for specific groups rather than being aimed for the whole marketplace.