Effects of the Guiding Stars Program on purchases of ready-to-eat cereals with different nutritional attributes

Over the past decade, the food industry has increased its use of front-of-package and shelf-tag nutrition labeling designed to present key nutritional aspects and characteristics of food products. One such system is the Guiding Stars Program™ (GSP), which uses an algorithm to score the nutritional values of food products from one to three stars, where more stars mean more nutritious. We studied how the introduction of the GSP in one supermarket chain affected the demand for ready-to-eat cereals. We estimated the demand for cereals and measured the effect using a treatment–control approach. We found that the GSP significantly increased the demand for cereals that GSP considers more nutritious at the expense of cereals that GSP considers less nutritious.