Consumer Preference for the Types of Labels of Cereal Products and Purchase Intention of Nutrition-labeled Products

Abstract

TALVEZ The purpose of this study was to explore consumer preference for the types of nutrition labels of cereal products and to identify some influencing factors on purchase intention and choice probability of nutrition-labeled products. First, most of the respondents preferred the traffic light-GDA (TL-GDA) nutrition fact panel, while the nutrition-fact-panel-only type and the nutrition fact panel with front-of-package (FOP) type were preferred by few respondents. However, consumers evaluated higher for TL-GDA type and FOP symbol types, while the nutrition-fact-panel-only type was evaluated much lower. Second, consumer preference for label types was partially related with ‘eating breakfast’ and consumer evaluations of the types of labels for the nutrition fact panel only and the nutrition fact panel with FOP symbol types were found to be significantly different by gender. Lastly, both purchase intention and choice probability for nutrition-labeled products were found to be significantly influenced by one’s interest in searching for information and one’s attitude toward the product. In addition, choice probability was found to be significantly influenced by individual characteristics such as gender and grade. It is necessary to find the relationship between nutrition labels and consumer response as this can help consumers make a better choice of food as well as providing some useful information on consumers to the related parties such as companies and consumer organizations.