Stephan Marette (INRA & AgroParisTech) Ecological and/or nutritional scores for food traffic-lights: Results of an online survey in France

A web survey was conducted in France to examine how providing different scores about environment and/or nutrition could influence purchase intents for pizza. 1200 participants were recruited in France in April 2021. They were asked about their purchase intents for one pizza, before and after seeing nutritional and/or ecological scores associated to colors. A global score synthetizing both nutritional and ecological dimensions was also tested. The results show that the appearance of scores and colors significantly affect the purchase intents. Indeed, for each type of score (namely nutritional, ecological or global), the dominant effect comes from the reduction in purchase intents for pizza related to the red color, although green or yellow colors also changes purchase intents but to a lesser extent. With the red color, the nutritional score leads to more significant decrease in purchasing intents than the ones related to the ecological score or the global score. With the green color, the highest increase in purchasing intents comes from the global score synthetizing nutritional and ecological dimensions. An additional round, allowing the appearance of the score not shown in the previous round, underlines that the negative impact of the red color with the initial score is not outweighed by the possible positive impact of the green color related to the new score shown in this additional round.