Abstract
Background: Nutrition and health claims are voluntary statements on the front-of-pack of food labels and in advertising regarding the nutrition content of the food or how it relates to health. In New Zealand and Australia, nutrition and health claims are regulated by Food Standard 1.2.7, introduced in 2013. Despite 59% of New Zealand packaged food items displaying a nutrition or health claim there is a lack of knowledge about how New Zealand consumers understand, perceive, and use nutrition and health claims in their food purchasing decisions. It is essential to understand how New Zealand consumers view and use nutrition and health claims to inform policy makers and public health officials in order to ensure that the current legislation is fulfilling its role.
Objective: This study aims to investigate how New Zealand consumers understand, perceive and use nutrition and health claims on packaged food labels.
Design: Primary food shoppers living in Dunedin, Wellington, and Nelson were recruited for this two-phase qualitative research project. Phase one comprised of ten semi-structured individual online interviews exploring how consumers understood, perceived and used nutrition and health claims. The semi-structured interviews contributed to the dataset, although, their primary purpose was to aid in the development of an effective focus group question guide. Phase two included seven focus groups in Dunedin, Wellington, and Nelson (n=39). All interviews and focus groups were transcribed verbatim and analysed using reflective thematic analysis using NVivo 12 software.
Results: Four themes were created from the ten semi-structured interviews; key factors influencing food shopping, consumer knowledge and understanding, consumer use of nutrition and health claims, and trust and scepticism. Five themes were discovered from the seven focus groups; key motives and influencers of product choice, suspicion and scepticism of claims, claims leading to confusion and lack of clarity, how claims help guide food choice, and not all claims are equal. The overarching findings were: nutrition and health claims were not frequently used in food shopping, other factors such as food price, preference and habit were more important in food choice behaviour, consumers were confused by claim meanings, and claims were perceived as 'marketing messages' that were mistrusted. However, specific claims were used by participants with dietary restrictions.
Conclusion: This qualitative study's findings indicate that nutrition and health claims do not factor highly in consumers’ food choice behaviour. Consumers lack understanding of the claims’ meanings, and most participants perceived nutrition and health claims with mistrust, scepticism and suspicion. However, the claims were used and helpful for consumers that had specific dietary requirements. The recommendations from these findings are; to consider formulating changes to Standard 1.2.7 to ensure that nutrition claims are transparent and do not mislead the consumer, implement nutrition profiling in products which display nutrition claims, and to initiate a health promotion approach to increase consumer knowledge of claim regulations.