What do consumers think of the FDA's new nutritional labels?

We've known for a few months now that the FDA has been planning to revise and update the nutritional labels appearing on packaged foods.  

There has been a lot of discussion in the news about the merits (and demerits) of the label.  But, what do consumers think?

In the most recent issue of my monthly Food Demand Survey (FooDS), we directly asked consumers what they thought.  Here is a screenshot of the question we asked (note: the order of the labels was randomly varied across surveys).

The images were taken from an FDA website showing an example of the new, proposed label along with an example of the current label.

We have data from 1,016 respondents (data was collected last week); results are weighted to be demographically representative of the US population with a sampling error of +/- 3%.

We found 26% said they preferred the current label, 57% preferred the new, proposed label, and the remaining 18% said they were indifferent.  

Food Demand Survey (FooDS) - April 2014

The newest release of our Food Demand Survey is now up.

Willingness-to-pay for most meat products was up this month, and consumers reported that they anticipate buying about the same amount of chicken, beef, and pork as in previous months despite expectations of higher prices for all three.  

Reported expenditures on food at home and away from home were down in April relative to March.  

Consumers reported hearing more about Salmonella and E coli and less about pink slime and lean fine textured beef in the news in recent weeks as compared to last month.  Consumer concern dropped the most for GMOs and E. coli and rose the most for beta-agonist and bird flu.

We added a couple interesting ad-hoc questions I'll blog about in a separate post.  

March 2014 Food Demand Survey (FooDS)

The March 2014 release of FooDS is now out.

A few highlights:

• Willingness-to-pay for chicken (particularly chicken wings) was down and willingness-to-pay for pork was up in March relative to February.
• Consumers anticipate buying less beef, pork, and chicken in March than was the case in February.
• For the first time in the nearly year long period we've been running FooDS, GMOs became the issue consumers reported hearing the most about in the news.  Still, consumers were more concerned about issue like Salmonella, E. Coli, and growth hormones than GMOs.  

In March, we asked several questions related to consumers' price knowledge. Results reveal significant dispersion in the prices ($/lb) consumers report expecting to see charged for ground beef, chicken breasts, and pork chops.  

Only 13% of consumers reported shopping for groceries in only one store during the past month, suggesting some degree of cross-store price comparisons; however, almost 50% reporting using loyalty cards most of the time when grocery shopping.

February 2014 Food Demand Survey (FooDS)

The latest release of the monthly Food Demand Survey (FooDS) is now up.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the Super Bowl earlier this month, consumer willingness-to-pay (WTP) for chicken wings was up 11% this month.  Consumers also appear to be poised to spend more on food away from home this month compared to previous months.  

We repeated a question we asked last month on trust in information about meat and livestock from different sources.  

In particular, we asked, “How trustworthy is information about meat and livestock from the following sources?” Fifteen sources were listed (the order randomly varied across respondents), and respondents had to place five sources in the most trustworthy category and five sources in the least trustworthy category. A scale of importance was created by calculating the proportion of times a meat and livestock information source as ranked most trustworthy minus the proportion of times it was ranked least trustworthy.

This month, we added a question asking how much people knew about each source of potential information (on a 1 to 5 scale).  When you combine those two, the following emerges

People have a high level of trust and knowledge of federal regulatory agencies (USDA and FDA).  Although people say they know companies like McDonald's and Tyson, they place a lower level of relative trust in information about meat and livestock from them.  The New York Times, University professors, and Chipotle have relatively low trust and low knowledge.  

Interestingly, being more familiar with a source does not appear to make one more or less likely to trust the source (the correlation between the two measures is almost zero at 0.03).  

I suppose, as an organization, the "ideal" place to be on this graph is to be highly trusted and well known.  What if an organization wants to become more trustworthy?  I suspect that's harder to do for entities that are already well known - like McDonald's or Tyson.  Plus, anytime one has a vested interest in an outcome, their information is unlikely to be as credible as sources with no (apparent) conflict of interest.  That's why it surprises me a bit University professors don't score a bit higher on the trust scale. Maybe people just don't think we know much about meat and livestock (but that's why I picked two Universities that were likely to differ in this regard).  A lot of open questions here. 

FooDS January 2014

We just posted the latest release of the monthly Food Demand Survey (FooDS).  

Demand for most meat products was up in January relative to December, as was awareness and concern for the 17 food issues we track.  The biggest jumps in awareness in the news occurred for swine flu and bird flu. 

As in the past, we added a few ad-hoc questions to the survey.  

The first ad-hoc question aimed to get at the perceived trustworthiness of different sources of information about meat and livestock (the idea for the question was suggested to me by Marco Costanigro at CSU).  

We asked, “How trustworthy is information about meat and livestock from the following sources?” Fifteen sources were listed (the order randomly varied across respondents), and respondents had to place five sources in the most trustworthy category and five sources in the least trustworthy category. A scale of importance was created by calculating the proportion of times a meat and livestock information source as ranked most trustworthy minus the proportion of times it was ranked least trustworthy.

I was a little surprised by some of the findings.

The USDA and FDA were reported as most trustworthy with 50% more people indicating the source as most trustworthy than least. A University professor from Harvard were seen as slightly more trustworthy than one from Texas A&M, but both were viewed as less trustworthy than interest groups like the Farm Bureau, the CSPI, or the HSUS.

News organizations, and particularly food companies, were viewed as least trustworthy. Chipotle was the seen as the least trust worthy organization studied – the restaurant chain was placed in the least trustworthy category 69% more often than in the most trustworthy category.

We also asked an open-ended question: “Do you have any food-related goals for the new year?”  You can find the categorization of responses here.  I give the award for the most honest answer to this response:

I hope to lose weight, but that's the goal every new year which is never met