Quick and Simple: Exploring the Effect of Different Heuristic Cues on Food Labelling

From an information point of view, a food label is a very limited area that can be used for various purposes. Selecting what to include on a label is key to attracting consumers’ attention and conveying information about a product and its characteristics. This work explores the inferences that consumers make about product dimensions (quality, naturalness, authenticity, sustainability, etc.) through potential heuristic cues placed on food labels. Some of these cues are proposed for the first time in this work. A between-groups experiment was conducted in which a real extra virgin olive oil label, with different manipulations (various languages, technical information, numerical quality indicators, environmental seals and company information), was shown to participants. The procedure was designed to avoid the participants making assumptions about the purpose of the study. The results showed a strong incidence of affective heuristic in all the subjects’ product evaluations that inhibited (stopping rule) their perceptions of the other heuristic cues and, in parallel, the usefulness of using several languages, as this increased their evaluations of the product in some dimensions.