A Little Bird Told Me... Nutri-Score Panoramas from a Flight over Europe, Connecting Science and Society

Within the Farm to Fork Strategy, the European Commission ask for a unified Front Of Pack nutritional label for food to be used at the European level. The scientific debate identified the Nutri-Score (NS) as the most promising candidate, but within the political discussion, some Member States brought to attention several issues related to its introduction. This misalignment led to a postponement of the final decision. With the aim to shed some light on the current stances and contribute to the forthcoming debate, the objective of the present work is to understand to what extent scientific research addresses the issues raised by the general public. We applied a structural topic model to tweets from four European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain) and to abstracts of scientific papers, all dealing with the NS topic. Different aspects of the NS debate are discussed in different countries, but scientific research, while addressing some of them (e.g., the comparison between NS and other labels), disregards others (e.g., relations between NS and traditional products). It is advisable, therefore, to widen the scope of NS research to properly address the concerns of European society and to provide policymakers with robust evidence to support their decisions

Price Determinants of Sparkling Wine in Poland: Does Reputation Really Matter?

Due to the important worldwide growth of the sparkling wine sector in the last years, this research aims to explore the Polish sparkling wine retail market by applying a hedonic price model. Poland is the most important market in Eastern Europe, with a noticeable increase in wine consumption in recent years. Few researches have investigated the price premium of wine attributes in this area, while none of these concentrated their analysis on sparkling wines. The aim of this research is to apply a hedonic price model to estimate the effects of credence attributes and quality signals on sparkling wines sold in the Polish capital. Data were collected from 35 retail stores in Warsaw. Findings suggest that collective reputation linked to designation of origin is the variable that most affects the price, followed by brand reputation and characteristics of the point of sale. The type of retailer has a significant effect on price: discounts and supermarkets imply a price decrease with respect to hypermarkets, whereas specialised shops charge a premium. Moreover, we explore the presence of wine with Italian sounding names: this positively affects wine price, confirming the role of imitations stressed in the recent literature