Healthy Choice : The Effect of Simplified POS Nutritional Information on Consumer Choice Behavior

Grocery retailers are joining the fray against obesity by offering a wide range of health and wellness programs at the point of sale. However, the success of such programs in promoting healthier choices remains an open question. We examine the effectiveness of a growing health and wellness initiative – a simplified nutrition scoring system. We present a conceptual framework that predicts the effect of such a scoring system on shoppers’ food decisions, their sensitivity to price and promotion, as well as the moderating influence of category-level factors. Using a large-scale quasi-experiment and panel data for over 535,000 frequent shopper program members of a grocery chain across eight product categories, we demonstrate that the point-of-sale nutrition scoring system helped consumers make healthier food choices, such that they switched to higher-scoring products in the post-rollout period. Our results also reveal that shoppers became less price sensitive and more promotion sensitive following the introduction of the food scoring system. We discuss implications for research and practice