This article describes an experiment to measure the impact of the Australasian “Health Star Rating” front of pack nutritional label system on consumer choice behaviour. This system presents a one-half to five star rating of nutritional quality via the front facings of food product packages. While this system has been recently rolled out across Australasia, no test of its impact on food choice has been conducted. A sample of 1200 consumers was recruited on exit from supermarkets in New Zealand. A 2 × 2 factorial design was used with two levels of cold cereal product nutritional status (high, five star/low, two star) and two levels of the Health Star Rating label (present/absent). The dependent variable was revealed choice behaviour. The results indicated that the presence of the label had a significant depressive effect on consumer preference, but that this impact was not moderated in any way by the nutritional status expressed by the label. The result represents a significant functional failure of the Health Star Rating label in this research environment. The nature of the failure is consistent with the consumers processing the label in much the same way as the nominal brand cues that dominate the retail food packaging.

Objective: The present research was an experimental test that aimed to quantify the impact of two dominant front-of-pack (FOP) nutritional label formats on consumer evaluations of food products that carried them. The two FOP label types tested were the traffic light label and the Percentage Daily Intake.Design: A 4×5 partially replicated Latin square design was used that allowed the impact of the FOP labels to be isolated from the effects of the product and the consumers who were performing the evaluations.Setting: The experiment was conducted on campus at the University of Otago, New Zealand.Subjects: The participants were 250 university students selected at random who met qualifying criteria of independent living and regular purchase of the products used in the research. They were not aware of the purpose of the research.Results: The presence of FOP labels led to significant and positive changes in consumer purchase intentions towards the products that carried them. These changes were not affected by the nature of FOP labels used, their size or the product nutritional status (good/bad) that they were reporting.Conclusions: The result is consistent with the participants paying attention to the FOP label and then using it as an adimensional cue indicating product desirability. As such, it represents a complete functional failure of both of these FOP label types in this specific instance. This result supports calls for further research on the performance of these FOP labels before any move to compulsory deployment is made.

Front-of-pack (FoP) nutrition labels are a widely deployed tool in public good marketing. This article reports on a field experimental test of the impact of one of these systems, the Australasian Health Star Rating system (HSR), on consumer choice in the breakfast cereals category in New Zealand. This study forms part of a time-series replication stream of research on this topic. The research applied a 2 × 2 factorial design with multiple replications to retail food consumers exiting from supermarkets in New Zealand. The first part of the time series, undertaken shortly after the HSR’s initiation in 2014, indicated that the HSR was ineffective. Between 2014 and 2016, commercial brands in the category within New Zealand massively promoted the HSR as a basis for consumer choice. The research presented in this article forms part of the second part of the series, undertaken in 2016, using an identical experimental methodology to the 2014 study. The results indicate that the HSR may be beginning to influence consumer choice as it was predicted to, but the impact of the system is still small, and statistically sub-significant, relative to other consumer decision inputs presented on the package.