The Influence of Taste-Focused Food Labelling on Vegetarian and Vegan Food Choice

Abstract

Animal-based product have a large negative impact on our environment. A sustainable diet entails reducing one’s meat consumption and instead choosing vegetarian and vegan alternatives. This research studied the impact taste-focused labelling has on an online sample’s preference of vegetarian dishes over non-vegetarian dishes and vegetarian dishes with regular names both in a menu-choice task and a binary choice task. It was expected that participants would choose more vegetarian dishes with tasty names over non-vegetarian dishes and regularly-named vegetarian dishes. The results revealed non-significant findings for the menu choice task and part of the binary choice task. Significant results were found for the contrast between taste-focused vegetarian dishes and regular-labelled vegetarian dishes. Taste-focused labelling had no effect on preference of vegetarian dishes on a menu, but it did decrease choice of meat dishes in a binary choice task. Keywords: Sustainability, vegetarian food choices, taste-focused labelling