How do consumers with food hypersensitivity read food labels and make critical and informed purchasing decision?

On 4th December 2023, we had the opportunity to present our proposed research programme ‘Food hypersensitivities, food labelling and informed purchasing decisions: An eye tracking investigation’ at the Anaphylaxis UK Business Symposium. There are several reasons why we are proposing the above study.

Food allergies in Western countries affect approximately 10% of the population, with the greatest prevalence being amongst younger children. Regulations are in place globally to protect consumers. Furthermore, the UK has some of the strictest food allergen labelling requirements (e.g., Natasha’s Law, 2021) and food labels must mandatorily declare 14 allergens.  Despite such stringent requirements, it remains that thousands of individuals suffer from serious reactions to food that they have purchased and consumed.

In respect of generic health concerns, one in five worldwide deaths is associated with poor diet.  WHO has recommended reduced levels of salt, sugar and saturated fats in food products, and has motivated consumers to make healthy choices by using simple, front-of-pack “traffic light” nutrition label. However, an individual with a generic health concern and a food hypersensitivity faces a much more challenging situation.  First, they must search for at least two types of information (information pertaining to health e.g., fat content and peanut content).  This is much more difficult since this is a dual-target search situation, where an individual searches for two or more different things simultaneously. Let’s use the following scenario to explain dual-target search.

Dual-Target Search

Airport security staff are trained to look for guns and knives (i.e., metal which is blue) and they will perform this task effectively. Explosives made of organic materials tends to come out orange. When tasked to search for guns, knives, and bombs (i.e., orange and blue objects simultaneously), performance declines significantly. This is referred to as dual-target cost in search. It is established that search performance deteriorates very substantially under dual- and triple-, relative to single-, target search conditions.

Photograph of a baggage screening X-ray display (Wikimedia Commons, 2006)

A key point, here, is that such processing is much more difficult for those with a food hypersensitivity who are required to process information relating to food hypersensitivity as well as generic health information, than for those processing information pertaining to generic health alone.  Thus, our proposed programme of research investigates how people with food hypersensitivities alongside generic health concerns relative to healthy controls identify and process food labels to make critical informed purchasing decisions. We intend to carry out our investigations using eye-tracking methodology. Tracking readers’ eye movements while reading has been successfully used to determine the cognitive processes readers perform during reading.

 

An example of eye-tracking methodology (Image: Own source, with permission)

 

If funded, we will post another blog post and hope to invite you to participate in our study.

 

Dr Jan Mei Soon-Sinclair & Professor Simon Liversedge

University of Central Lancashire

 

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