When and How Simplified Nutrition Labels Improve Fast-Food Choices

Simplified nutrition labels, such as Nutri-Score, are increasingly used in grocery stores, but their effects on out-of-home consumption, their psychological mechanisms, and potential moderators remain poorly understood. An initial online experiment showed that Nutri-Score leads fast-food customers to select meals (and especially desserts) of higher nutritional quality by helping them identify the healthiest options, ruling out three other theory-driven potential mechanisms. A field study involving 200,039 fast-food meals replicated the positive effects of Nutri-Score in a middle-class metropolitan area but found that it backfired in a less affluent provincial town. A second online experiment, which recruited a nationally representative sample, replicated the nutritional improvement for middle-class people living in metropolitan areas, but found no effect among those with a lower socioeconomic status living in provincial towns. Nutrition importance was the only one of the nine factors tested that moderated the effects of Nutri-Score and explained dietary differences across these groups.