Healthy food choice – the great challenge of our society : A comprehensive overview of Hungarians’ attitudes toward FOP nutrition labels and sugar consumption

Absztrakt (kivonat)

This thesis aims to investigate the most influential factors of food choice in Hungary, as well as the efficiency of some common forms of front-of-package nutrition labels (FOP labels), particularly focusing on the “no added sugar” content claim. This paper seeks answers to the following questions: What considerations do people take before purchasing foods and beverages? Are customers able to use the current, common forms of FOP labels to perform healthy food choices? What attitude do they demonstrate toward products that have a “no added sugar” label and those items that fail to represent such an attribute? Finally, is the overestimation of “no added sugar” products a common tendency in Hungary? The core of the paper relies on two prominent works in the field, namely The Psychology of Food Choice written by Richard Shepherd and Monique Raats in 2006, and The psychology of eating: From healthy to disordered behaviour published by Jane Ogden in 2011. The empirical part of the thesis is based on an online questionnaire that investigates the attitudes of 152 Hungarian people. The key findings of the research encompass that most people base their food choice on taste and price, whereas only a small proportion of them take the nutritional value and health impacts into consideration. Furthermore, out of four commonly applied FOP nutrition labels – including the Reference Intake, “sugar-free” content claim, Traffic Light label, and the Nutri-Score -only one, the Traffic Light proved itself to be sufficient enough to facilitate healthy food choices. In addition, the research highlighted that most people overestimate the healthiness of “no added sugar” products. Testing the questionnaire on a larger sample, involving all segments of the Hungarian population could be a great initiative for future research on the topic. In addition, investigating not only the attitude of customers but the actual food choices and consumer behavior patterns could be another interesting exploration of the future.