Food Labelling: Factors that Shape Effectiveness for Health and Sustainability

Labelling is an important tool to inform consumers and encourage healthier and more sustainable food choices. Governments and organizations worldwide have introduced a range of approaches, including nutrition, health, and environmental labels across multiple platforms such as product packaging, menus, and digital media. Certified labels aim to provide clear and reliable information to guide purchasing decisions. At the same time, unverified nutrition, health, and sustainability claims used by brands can also impact consumer outcomes, sometimes leading to misunderstanding or misperceptions.While labels are increasingly adopted, their effectiveness is not uniform. Emerging evidence suggests that the impact of labelling depends on how it interacts with other elements - such as visual design, pricing, marketing cues, etc. - as well as individual characteristics – such as consumer literacy, motivation, and socioeconomic context. Understanding these interactions is crucial to assess real-world effectiveness and inform the design of effective and equitable labelling policies.This Research Topic aims to advance understanding of the mechanisms and boundary conditions that determine when and how food labelling effectively promotes healthier and more sustainable behaviours. It seeks to identify the cross-disciplinary factors that shape labelling outcomes by integrating insights from behavioural nutrition, psychology, consumer research, marketing, and policy analysis. Specifically, this Research Topic will examine how labelling interacts with contextual features of retail and digital environments, product design, and socio-demographic variables to inform more equitable and effective labelling strategies. The overarching objective is to generate evidence that can guide policymakers and practitioners in developing comprehensive interventions that align consumer incentives with public health and sustainability goals.To gather further insights into contextual, behavioural, and policy dimensions, we welcome contributions that empirically and theoretically explore diverse manifestations of food labelling across settings. This includes both certified and non-certified labels and analyses spanning micro-level cognitive mechanisms to macro-level policy contexts.We particularly encourage multidisciplinary approaches employing experimental, qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods designs.We welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:- Interaction between labelling and contextual cues such as claims, branding, pricing, visual design, and online presentation- Multi-label environments and the cognitive implications of information overload- Individual-level moderators of labelling effectiveness, including literacy, motivation, cultural context, and socioeconomic status- Cognitive and behavioural mechanisms underlying labelling effects, including attention, heuristic processing, and cognitive load- Combined interventions and policy analyses exploring how labelling interacts with fiscal, marketing, or reformulation measures in shaping behavioural outcomes Topic editors: Tim Smits, Lotte Hallez, Georgie Russell, Meghan Kelly, Susanne Pedersen Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81134/food-labelling-factors-that-shape-effectiveness-for-health-and-sustainability