Az egészségre vonatkozó jelölések fogyasztói megítélése

Absztrakt

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of food labels that contain health related information. We examined the consumers’ judgements on consumption benefits, hazard of food ingredients and the health claims. We performed a nationwide survey with 1000 participants, ensuring representativeness with quotas and taking measures to ensure total randomness. The spontaneous knowledge of food labels referring to consumption benefits was reasonably low, although the inducted knowledge of the same labels was more promising. To explain these results we discussed the role of spontaneous and inducted knowledge during the purchasing process. The listed food ingredients were ranked to be hazardous (except of vegetable fats) and the consumers considered all the listed health claims to be important so we did further investigation on these topics on the basis of the consumers’ income. The results showed that the consumer group with average income level considered the food ingredients most hazardous and the health claims most important. It seems that the average income level assures the most awareness of this information. In the issue of spontaneous and inducted knowledge we concluded that the most effective is to place two health claims on the products a general that supports spontaneous knowledge and better understanding and a specialised one to support inducted knowledge and distinguishing.