Comprised of academic experts, retailers, SME-representatives and not-for-profit organisations, the FLABEL research consortium is well placed to provide the definitive pan-European study on the role that nutrition information plays on food labels. Amongst the many research findings, the consortium achieved the following:
- Provided the first EU-wide benchmark study on incidence and penetration of nutrition information on food labels, leading to insights into what extent nutrition labelling is actually available in different parts of the EU.
- Generated knowledge on the determinants of consumer attention and reading, liking and understanding of different types of nutrition labels, explicitly dealing with the potential trade-offs between simplicity, completeness and coerciveness of nutrition information on food labels.
- Generated European large-scale knowledge of actual nutrition label use in a real world context, drawing on both store observations and retail scanner data, leading to solid insights into the extent and ways in which nutrition labels have behavioural consequences and affect consumption patterns.
- Provided research evidence on how consumers form opinions about the healthiness of products, and how the nutrition label information interacts with other information in this process, including media, advertising and school education.
- Addressed the role of nutrition information on food labels in food decision-making in families with children, thus providing evidence on how nutrition labels can be used to positively influence children’s dietary intake.
- Developed a research-based best practice proposal for nutrition labelling, and tested it in a real-world store environment.
- A set of best practice methods for assessing the impact of nutrition labelling on consumer’s product choice.
