Presentation of results at Clymbol Conference
June 16th, 2016
After 4 years of research, the end results of the Clymbol project were presented at a conference in Brussels 15 June. During this meeting, that focussed on the role of health-related claims and symbols in consumer behaviour, the main findings of this research were presented. Below some highlights of all the results presented.
The study shows that the appearance on the market of products with a health or nutrition claim or symbol is not equally distributed among Europe. An explanation for thisare the national initiatives that use symbols to indicate a healthier choice in a product category, like the keyhole symbol in Scandinavia and the Choices logo in The Netherlands.
Overall, products carrying a claim or symbol have a relatively healthier nutrient composition compared to products without a claim. Several nutrient profiles were compared, to see how strict they were on selecting the healthier products in a food composition database. Here it was demonstrated that some (inter)national used sets of criteria did select healthier products and that the sets of criteria used by several health symbols were even more strict.
Results based on household purchase data from GfK show that consumers value products that carry a health symbol, such as the Keyhole logo or the Choices logo. No specific group of consumers that make more or less use of the logo could be identified. The effect of the logo introduction on purchase volumes has not yet been investigated.
Test in supermarkets showed only a small effect on the purchase of products carrying a claim. Real life tests demonstrated that the Choices logo does not lead to overconsumption when used in a somewhat artificial restaurant setting. In addition, the study confirms that the logo reduces the intake of unhealthy foods. Also other studies were performed on the influence of claims or symbols on consumer choice. The overall conclusion was that claims or symbols only have subtle effects on purchase choice. This effect was mainly influenced the motivation to choose for healthy products. Read more about the Clymbol project at http://www.clymbol.eu/.