Effects of front-of-pack labels on the nutritional quality of supermarket food purchases: evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial

To examine whether four pre-selected front-of-pack nutrition labels improve food purchases in real-life grocery shopping settings, we put 1.9 million labels on 1,266 food products in four categories in 60 supermarkets and analyzed the nutritional quality of 1,668,301 purchases using the FSA nutrient profiling score. Effect sizes were 17 times smaller on average than those found in comparable laboratory studies. The most effective nutrition label, Nutri-Score, increased the purchases of foods in the top third of their category nutrition-wise by 14%, but had no impact on the purchases of foods with medium, low, or unlabeled nutrition quality. Therefore, Nutri-Score only improved the nutritional quality of the basket of labeled foods purchased by 2.5% (-0.142 FSA points). Nutri-Score’s performance improved with the variance (but not the mean) of the nutritional quality of the category. In-store surveys suggest that Nutri-Score’s ability to attract attention and help shoppers rank products by nutritional quality may explain its performance

Towards the integration and development of a cross-European research network and infrastructure:the DEterminants of DIet and Physical ACtivity (DEDIPAC) Knowledge Hub

To address major societal challenges and enhance cooperation in research across Europe, the European Commission has initiated and facilitated ‘joint programming’. Joint programming is a process by which Member States engage in defining, developing and implementing a common strategic research agenda, based on a shared vision of how to address major societal challenges that no Member State is capable of resolving independently. Setting up a Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) should also contribute to avoiding unnecessary overlap and repetition of research, and enable and enhance the development and use of standardised research methods, procedures and data management. The Determinants of Diet and Physical Activity (DEDIPAC) Knowledge Hub (KH) is the first act of the European JPI ‘A Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life’. The objective of DEDIPAC is to contribute to improving understanding of the determinants of dietary, physical activity and sedentary behaviours. DEDIPAC KH is a multi-disciplinary consortium of 46 consortia and organisations supported by joint programming grants from 12 countries across Europe. The work is divided into three thematic areas: (I) assessment and harmonisation of methods for future research, surveillance and monitoring, and for evaluation of interventions and policies; (II) determinants of dietary, physical activity and sedentary behaviours across the life course and in vulnerable groups; and (III) evaluation and benchmarking of public health and policy interventions aimed at improving dietary, physical activity and sedentary behaviours. In the first three years, DEDIPAC KH will organise, develop, share and harmonise expertise, methods, measures, data and other infrastructure. This should further European research and improve the broad multi-disciplinary approach needed to study the interactions between multilevel determinants in influencing dietary, physical activity and sedentary behaviours. Insights will be translated into more effective interventions and policies for the promotion of healthier behaviours and more effective monitoring and evaluation of the impacts of such intervention

The impact of the French soda tax on prices and purchases: an ex post evaluation

We estimate the price and consumption effects of the 2012 French tax on sweetened non-alcoholic drinks using a difference-in-difference approach. Our identification strategy exploits Italian data as a natural control group. We use French and Italian Consumer Price Indices, purchase prices and quantities from the 2011 and 2012 Kantar and GfK home-scan surveys for two French regions and two neighbouring Italian regions, and expenditure data from the 2011 and 2012 Italian Expenditure Survey. We check for the robustness of our results by applying the difference-in-difference models using only French data and considering water as the benchmark (control) good. We find that the tax is transmitted to the prices of taxed drinks, with full transmission for soft drinks and partial transmission for fruit juices. The evidence on purchase responses is mixed and less robust, indicating at most a very small reduction in soft drink purchases (about half a litre per capita per year), an impact which would be consistent with the low tax rate. We find suggestive evidence of a larger response by the sub-sample of heavy purchasers. Fruit juices and water do not seem to have been affected by the tax

Reformulation and taxes for healthier consumption: Empirical evidence in the French Dessert market

Many countries have implemented the taxation of unhealthy food. Facing such a tax, firms can adapt their pricing strategy and modify the characteristics of their products. There are, so far, only a few ex-ante analyses of the impact of taxes on consumption that endogenize the price response of firms to the tax policy. However, none of them takes into account the possibility for firms to modify the characteristics of a product. In this paper, we propose an ex-ante evaluation of the effects of a tax that targets products high in caloric sweeteners on key market outcomes, by integrating not only the strategic price reactions of firms, but also the exogenous changes in a product’s nutritional composition. We develop a structural econometric model that integrates the consumer’s substitution patterns between products, accounts for competition between firms, and integrates the possibility for firms to modify the characteristics of a product in response to taxation. Using household scanner data from the French dessert market, we show that ignoring how firms might react to a tax policy leads to a significant underestimation of the potential impact of taxation on the consumption of taxed nutrients. In our case, we show that ignoring the combined effect of strategic price reactions and product reformulation leads to the impact of the tax on the intake of the taxed nutrient being underestimated by 44%. From a policy-oriented perspective, we conclude that a taxation scheme should be designed to favor product reformulation by firms

Effects of front-of-pack labels on the nutritional quality of supermarket food purchases: evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial

To examine whether four pre-selected front-of-pack nutrition labels improve food purchases in real-life grocery shopping settings, we put 1.9 million labels on 1,266 food products in four categories in 60 supermarkets and analyzed the nutritional quality of 1,668,301 purchases using the FSA nutrient profiling score. Effect sizes were 17 times smaller on average than those found in comparable laboratory studies. The most effective nutrition label, Nutri-Score, increased the purchases of foods in the top third of their category nutrition-wise by 14%, but had no impact on the purchases of foods with medium, low, or unlabeled nutrition quality. Therefore, Nutri-Score only improved the nutritional quality of the basket of labeled foods purchased by 2.5% (-0.142 FSA points). Nutri-Score’s performance improved with the variance (but not the mean) of the nutritional quality of the category. In-store surveys suggest that Nutri-Score’s ability to attract attention and help shoppers rank products by nutritional quality may explain its performance