An Empirical Analysis of Simplified Nutrition Labeling and Its Usefulness using Behavioural Insights

Associate Professor Hiromi Fujimori at the Department of Food Economics at Tokyo University of Agriculture has a background in behavioural economics and brain-decoding. She is applying this knowledge to better understand the links between behaviour and economic choices, giving her a unique perspective. She is a proponent of the importance of food labelling in order to perform and protect consumers and believes that consumers would be more effectively safeguarded from accidentally ingesting allergens if they had the right food labels. She postulates that those with limited knowledge of food labels and nutrients, people who can’t read kanji, people with impaired cognitive function or those who simply don’t have time to carefully read labels would benefit from simplified food labelling. Fujimori and her research team are performing an empirical analysis of simplified nutrition labelling. Using eye tracking devices, line-of-sight was measured in order to differentiate between gazing and skipping over different types of information on food labels. By analysing the data, the researchers can better understand the types of information that people pay attention to. With many cases of accidental ingestion of allergens, Fujimori believes that clear food labelling is not just an academic concern, but an urgent consumer policy issue. As testing so far has been on a small sample size, she and her team plan to expand this in order to confirm the validity of the results. They will also revalidate the results by conducting experiments with brain activity measurements other than eye tracking devices.