Do Traffic Light Labels Influence Food Purchase Intentions? The Moderating Effect of Health Risk Perception

ABSTRACT Most extant nutrition labeling studies examine how different nutrition labels affect consumers’ purchase intentions or how nutrition knowledge influences shoppers’ final decisions. However, most scholars have ignored that the channel of risk attitudes toward a food product may indirectly affect shoppers’ purchase intentions as a result of the health risk perception arising at the time of seeing nutrition labels. We empirically compare the effect of the Traffic Light (TL) label with the icon-only nutrition label on participants’ attitudes and health risk perceptions linked to their purchase intentions regarding a pizza product. The findings from the online experiment show that the TL label has a more significant effect on purchase intention than the icon-only nutrition label. However, this effect is different based on consumers’ health risks perception. Consumers with low health risk perception were more likely to purchase pizza, but those with high health risk perception decrease their purchases.