- C(l)ue Me In - Enhancing Consumers’ Attention to Ingredient List Information

Background
Consumers commonly report a strong preference for natural over processed, additives-enriched, and modified food products. Therefore, policy makers have established E-numbers as indicators of food ingredients safety, which often, ironically, provoke negative associations with chemical substances in consumers. Meanwhile, food manufacturers are responding to these demands by designing clean label products. Yet, these efforts are based on the unsupported assumption that consumers infer a food product’s naturalness by its ingredients.
Methods
The current study examined the extent to which consumers attend to ingredient information on food packaging. We employed the choice-blindness paradigm by Johansson and colleagues (2005) rather than relying on commonly used self-report measures that are prone to demand characteristics. Additionally, we investigated whether providing a subtle external cue encourages consumers to consider ingredient list information.
Consumers were presented with two novel, fictitious brands of canned soup and were asked to evaluate them on overall appeal and level of naturalness. During a filler task the experimenter removed the two cans of soup and depending on the assigned condition exchanged (or did not exchange) the initial can of soup for a new can. The new can was identical on all aspects except that it showed a different ingredient list. This new can was returned to the participants and they were asked to justify their ratings of either overall appeal or naturalness. The main DV was whether participants detected the change of ingredient list information on the new can.
We expected few participants to detect the change in the ingredient list information, but also that participants instructed to justify their ratings of naturalness would be more likely to detect the change compared to participants instructed to justify their ratings on overall appeal.
Results
As predicted, findings revealed that only a minority of participants detected the change, thereby challenging the assumption that consumers use ingredient lists as a source of information. However, when instructed to justify ratings of naturalness rather than overall appeal, more participants detected the change. This implies that an instruction reminding participants to consider naturalness mitigated the low rate of detection.
Conclusions
These results seem to contradict previous findings based on self-report measures showing that consumers use ingredient information to evaluate products and the general preference for natural products. Employing our behavioral assessment of attention to ingredient information showed that, during actual product evaluations, participants are less attentive to this information than expected. It appears that despite reported concerns for naturalness, consumers may be prone to mindlessness at the point of evaluation or purchase. This reasoning is in line with our findings that reminding participants to consider naturalness improves attention to ingredient lists as measured by levels of detection.
These findings are relevant for policy makers and food manufactures attempting to cater to consumers’ preferences. Furthermore, they call for future research to investigate reasons underlying consumers’ limited attention to ingredient information and to design more effective strategies of informing consumers. On a practical level, the findings suggest that subtle cues may help consumers adhere to their self-reported preferences.