Evaluating the Relative Effectiveness of Two Front-of-pack Nutrition Labels

In efforts to promote a healthy diet, the Singapore Health Promotion Board (HPB) has attempted to use Front-of-Pack (FOP) labelling to supplement traditional nutrition labelling. The Healthier Choice Symbol (HCS) identifies food items within a specific category of foods as healthier choices. The original logos were enhanced to include additional information focusing on particular macronutrients, taking one of two themes; it either indicates that a product contains more of a healthier ingredient, or less of a less healthy ingredient. However, there is a lack of scientific evidence on the role of the existing symbols in assisting consumers make healthier food purchasing decisions. Thus far, studies have established that the United Kingdom's Multiple Traffic Lights (MTL) label, and the new French Nutri-Score (NS) label, are amongst the top performers. However, there is little consensus on which is the most effective FOP label to promote diet quality. Thus, the investigators propose to conduct the following: Use a three arm randomized controlled trial (RCT) and an experimental fully functional web-based grocery store to test two competing approaches of front-of-pack (FOP) labelling on measures of diet quality: 1) United Kingdom's Multiple Traffic Lights label (MTL) or 2) France's Nutri-Score (NS) labelling scheme. The investigators hypothesize that diet quality as measured by the Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI-2010) (primary outcome) will be highest in the NS arm, followed by MTL, and lowest in the no logo control arm.