Human Factor in Smart Labelling: How Enhance Food Awareness in Consumers

Abstract

In current scenario an evolution, regarding several actors involved in food network, emerges. Food Democracy and Food Citizenship movements show new awareness by consumers during the food purchase experience, who demand more and several information about food. The channel to convey this information is the label. Designing strategically a label able to satisfy the consumer needs could represent the success of food industry. The change of the market pushes producers and food companies to shift towards a vision ethical and sustainability oriented of the food production and packaging. The challenge consists to communicate all the information that consumer wants, taking into account how he approaches food label. In order to understand the contents about food information demanded by consumer, a crosssectional survey was conducted interviewing visitors to a food and wine Italian event. The answers were processed and analysed through qualitative analysis of the content and term frequency analysis. Four main clusters of information were identified. From literature, four patterns of processing label information adopted by consumer emerged. The purpose of the present work is to match content and patterns of approach to the food label, designing and proposing four different layouts of a smart label leveraging on IT solution.