Shelf deception: How does marketing on packaged foods influence us?

Transcript

Intro: This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging. From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks.

Nick: Hello, I'm Nick Haslam, and welcome to our last episode of PsychTalks, for this season anyway. And as always, I'm joined by my enigmatic, charismatic co-host, Cassie Hayward.

Cassie: Hi, Nick. Thank you for that introduction. Yes, we're winding up the season for now, but what fascinating areas of research we've covered. We've looked at everything from how languages shape our thoughts in our episode with Dr Frank Mollica, to what's the best tactic to ask for a pay increase at work with our colleague, Professor Jen Overbeck.

Nick: It's been a real pleasure, and we've got one more topic ahead today. We're asking, are we really making smart choices in the supermarket? Associate Professor Helen Dixon and Jane Martin join us to unpack the psychology, policy and packaging that influence what ends up in our trolleys.

Cassie: Welcome to PsychTalks, Helen and Jane. So onto today's topic, I think we can all relate to the scenario of shopping for food and just being bombarded with on pack imagery and claims. I've got 3 little kids. I walk down those aisles and used to see a lot. Can we start with just the lay of the land in terms of the regulations around what manufacturers can say on the packs? Are there rules around the text and the imagery and the claims that they can make?

Jane: So there are some legislated requirements and rules around um elements such as the nutrition information panel, and that's why it always looks the same on the back of the pack, and there are other requirements on other information on the pack, so health claims and high-level health claims, um, when you're talking about something like high in sugar or low in sugar, high in calcium, they're regulated. But the vast majority of what's appearing on the pack is basically unregulated, and they're the most influential elements that we'll go into. And basically, there's not a lot of regulation on many of the, the packet space.

Nick: So that's what the rules say, and that's what the regulations are, but do people respond rationally to this information, so you give accurate information about nutrition, let's say on food packaging. Are people paying attention to that?

Helen: Well, we know that many shoppers, when they're shopping, just refer to the front of the pack, and they might be shopping with crying kids in the trolley or tired and rushed after work. And so they're making quick decisions, and they often rely on heuristics to appraise products. And we've done some quite fun research looking at how, if front of pack marketing claim highlights an isolated positive attribute of a, an otherwise unhealthy product, people will generalise and it effectively serves to put a health halo over the product. So a classic example is marshmallows, 98% fat free, but not mentioning, you know, 98% sugar, sugar or whatever.

Cassie: Um, Helen, I'm sure a lot of our listeners know the term heuristics, but just so we're all on the same page. What do you mean by that?

Helen: It's really just a quick rule of thumb, a quick kind of cognitive strategy, and, um, it's often applying generalisations to things, but it can lead to inaccurate assessments of things. So people, um, do make these quick-thinking decisions. Uh, we do know though, that consumers who do slow down and read the back of the pack, that can almost empower them to be not as sucked in by what's happening on the front of the pack. So there's little simple rules of thumb with the ingredients listed is meant to, uh, list the ingredients in order of weight. And so those ingredients that appear first are the bulk of the products. And, and in the NIP, a good way if you're wanting to compare products is compare the per 100 gram column, you know, and you might see, it might make you work out that the iced coffee you thought was a good option actually has 16 teaspoons of sugar or something.

Cassie: And the, the NIP is the nutrition information panel.

Helen: That's right.

Cassie: And Helen, not just to blatantly plug the work you and I did together, but I will. Um, we did some work looking at parents evaluating children's snack food packaging, and it was interesting to see that even if rationally they knew that this quote unquote, health fruit snack wasn't actually healthy, if it had imagery of fruits on the front, it kind of prompted them just to think, ‘Oh, this is healthy’. Are we that gullible when it comes to these packaging things?

Helen: First, I've got to say, I think that was one of the most fun studies for last year. But yeah, it was fascinating. So in this study, we, we had a graphic designer prepare these mock packs of, of processed snack foods, and we varied whether they had just a picture of the actual snack that looked a bit like the veggie one looked bit like a cheese all and the fruit one looked a bit lolly-ish. And then we had some packs which had pictures of fresh produce, so photos of fruit or in the case of the veggie one, photos of corn cobs. Then we had cartoons with, you know, produce with eyes and legs and things, possibly a child targeted marketing strategy. And then we had this kind of idyllic setting with kids in a veggie garden with a basket of fresh produce.

And interestingly, we found that the photos of fresh produce were the most persuasive, and parents appraised the equivalent product as healthier when they, uh, saw that imagery. And also the cartoons and the photos, they perceived the product as more attractive. And we actually found when we did a bit of an analysis of what predicted their intentions to purchase a given product,

That it was how appealing or attractive they thought the product was that was important. And I think that's interesting too, because in the area of health psychology and health communication, it's easy for us to get caught up and think that everyone's preoccupied with health, and if we tell them something's healthy, they'll want to eat it. But the reality is, we know from our research that taste, cost, convenience, and health concerns are key considerations, and for some consumers, you know, cost and taste is way ahead of health concerns. So, yeah, it's important to be realistic about that.

Cassie: Out of curiosity, has there ever been a food product that's fooled you with its claims or with its marketing?

Helen: One that got me relatively recently is these dried pea snacks. And I actually thought they were sort of roasted whole pea pods. And I bought them thinking they're an OK option, but they are actually kind of pea-shaped things that might be like a chip or a twisty moulded into a shape of a pea. And, um, I think they're highly processed and highly deceptive.

Cassie: So they're as much as a pea is a potato chip is a potato.

Helen: Yeah. And look, it's possible I got tricked too because in the manner that people in our study did, because there are photos of happy little green pea pods on the front of the pack.

Nick: So, so there are cases like that where you just don't know where there's no way of knowing and the, uh, marketing might be a bit deceptive. Are there cases where the marketing is not that deceptive, but you just don't see what you don't want to see? So you sort of know it's unhealthy, but you just want the product so much that you'll just overlook it.

Helen: Well, that's a really interesting point, Nick, because we did a study last year where we tested parents' responses to different types of marketing claims that commonly appear on, on commercial baby and toddler food products.

And what we found was the claims that talk about free from were the most persuasive. And interestingly, we, in some of the audits we've done of products, we find they're the most prevalent claims. So perhaps industry knows they work. But if you you think about sort of psych theory and motivation, they're really appealing to a risk avoidance motivation or a kind of first do no harm. And I think parents want to do the right thing by kids, but they're time poor or they want a convenient option, you know, that the kids are not gonna spill yoghurt all over the car seat in the car or whatever. But, um, they kind of might know sometimes these foods aren't great, but at least if it's got no nasties in it, they think that's quite a persuasive sort of claim.

Nick: No asbestos. I'll eat that.

So in the tobacco space, uh, we've seen a move to plain packaging and the inclusion of more and more public health information about smoking's risks. Where do you sit on the marketing of packaged foods? Are you looking for stricter rules about how they're packaged as well?

Jane: Yeah definitely. I mean, we've spent, you know, the first part of this podcast talking about the influence of these claims and the packaging, even the colours of the packets. It, it's all, you know, combined. There's a lot of synergies around the, you know, to create the biggest impact to sell the product. So, I mean, my sort of best case scenario would be to own health, to own the pack. I mean, we've seen in Chile these hexagonal warnings, um, around high in sugar, salt, fat, energy, and that's had a huge impact, and it's worked in two ways, which I think is exactly what we want to see in Australia. It's shifted people to healthier foods and more sort of traditional diets. So it's not just moving people around the processed food space, which isn't really where you want to go.

It's moving people to less processed, more natural foods, foods that are, you know, supporting local farmers, which is a good thing. It's going back into that local economy. So I think, you know, that's very attractive to government. For example, if you're just not talking about shifting the processed packaged food demand, but that you are moving people into these healthier products. And there's certainly a lot more that we can do. We can take things off, and we can make sure that we get more sort of honest, truthful labelling. So people aren't, you know, they just get slightly confused by lots of different things. And we can start to cut through that, but by removing some of these persuasive elements, um, we can give people a better picture of what the food actually is.

Helen: The name should reflect the bulk of the ingredients, but we know there are instances where, for example, there might be a baby food called ‘Broccoli, pumpkin, and apple’, but when you look at the back of the pack, it's 80% apple or something like that. So I think, yes, that would be my wish that the text and the imagery honestly represents the products, because we know they're both really important and that consumers rely on them to make decisions, but also to think about pro-health front of pack nutrition labelling schemes, like, we know the Health Star rating, it's currently voluntary, but when we've done studies, if you apply that, if it was made mandatory to all products, it does facilitate healthier choices.

And we've recently done some studies testing labelling schemes similar to the ‘high in’ labelling that some of the South American countries are using with Australian consumers. And we found that that helps parents identify products higher in added sugars and reorients their preferences towards healthier options.

Nick: Baby food. I mean, are there any specific regulations or rules in relation to baby and toddler food in particular?

Jane: Yeah, so this is an area we've done a lot of research to fill in the gap, so policymakers understand what the market's like. So it's a growing market. We've seen, you know, more and more products are coming on the market and we had a consultation in 2019. The issue came onto the agenda, and the sort of key issues have recently been moved into the food regulator. So they're around composition of the product, so it's not just the labelling, but what's, what's in the product. So that's around levels of sodium and levels of sugar, which is really important, and a lot of these products are sweet.

They contain a lot of sugars derived from fruit, particularly apple and pear, which is probably cheap. Um, and even savoury products, like Helen was talking about, they're not whole meals, really. They're, you know, could be 80% apple. And it's also about having names that accurately reflect the ingredients, um, what's on the front of the pack, so not being able to use these pictures of, um, pumpkin and apple, unless they make up a significant portion of the product in a whole form, not in a processed form, because you, you know, what you're seeing should be what you're actually getting. So really trying to have more truth in the labelling, but also to try and encourage the manufacturers and, and shift them to, um, and incentivise them to create healthier products, because we have so many snack foods for toddlers.

We don't have really well-made, um, nutritious and nourishing meals for children. And we need to sort of shift this to create a healthier source of food for parents who do want to use these products. And, you know, they are convenient, but wouldn't it be great if we had a nourishing, healthy supply of these products? I mean, it, it is the ultimate con in that young children can eat the same healthy food as the rest of the family. They might just need it to be mashed. So it is a bit of a sort of marketing, you know, creation that these products are, you know, we're seeing more and more of these products in the supermarket because children can eat, eat other foods that are potentially cheaper, um, as well. But, you know, having this special market and these special sort of ways of promoting them is, is very persuasive, and it, and it just shows the success of that kind of approach.

Helen: And I think nutrition is so interesting, particularly for kids, because it's not only important for lifelong chronic disease prevention, but to enable them to, to grow, you know, flourish in a developmental sense. And we do have stricter rules about the composition of baby foods cause they have certain iron requirements and so on. But the toddler food category has really emerged as this whole new category of products in recent years. And what's interesting is, uh, the Australian dietary guidelines for kids in, in the toddler age group, they basically recommend that they can eat family foods. You know, there are textural issues before kids have teeth, that they may need purees and so on. But there's no reason, you know, that a 4-year-old needs to be sucking puree out of a pouch. They, they can be eating family foods.

So, yeah, it's fascinating. This whole product category's arrived. And then because they're kind of presented in the aisle in the supermarket with nappies and baby shampoo, it's kind of implicit from their placement, all these foods are appropriate for kids.

Cassie: On that, not just related to toddler foods, but, uh, Helen, you mentioned the health star rating. I think a lot of people will be surprised that that's not a mandatory piece of information that's on all food that manufacturers can choose to display that or not. What does your research say about the usefulness or perhaps the misinterpretation of the health star rating?

Helen: Well, when we have done studies where it is applied uniformly to products. It does enable consumers to compare products within a given category and identify healthier options. The algorithm to assign stars to products, kind of, they get demerit points for being high in nutrients of concern, like saturated fat, salt, sugar, etc. And, and kind of bonus points for positive nutritional attributes. And there are a few exceptions to the rule, but generally, the algorithm does work and is a good indicator of higher stars being a healthier choice.

Cassie: But only within a category, right? So you can't compare a frozen food star to a cereal star.

Jane: No, but the categories are quite broad. I think the main issue is that 2/3 of products aren't carrying the health star. And if, if you're a consumer out there listening to this, if a product's not carrying a health star, find something that is, and that's higher rather than lower, because it is used as a marketing tool, and that gives me comfort, apart from the research that it works. So, that's why food manufacturers aren't putting it on their lower rating products, because it does influence consumers. So that's why we're advocating for it to be mandatory.

And for 3 out of 4 Australians who use the health stars, um, it helps them to understand which are what product's healthier. So it is being used. What's undermining trust in it is that it's not mandatory and not sort of seen to be government endorsed, and a standard that all food manufacturers have to meet. So that is in some way undermining the effectiveness of this system, which was designed to simplify the nutrition information panel and bring it to the front of the pack. So it was a sort of meant to be a time-saving way to support, you know, people when they're actually choosing what foods they want to buy.

And in that supermarket situation where they're all side by side on the shelf, you know, they are basically within category. So that's, you know, where you can sort of compare cereals against each other because there's a wall of them. So that's where it does have its sort of utility, I suppose.

Nick: what other research have you done on how food marketing can influence our food choices?

Helen: We've done lots of research on different forms of marketing. We've done stuff, elite sports sponsorship, both in relation to alcohol and food, because those events have really high audience reach. The AFL Grand Final has the biggest audience of any televised sporting event for the year. And so it's a great way to reach adults and kids, unfortunately, with alcohol, gambling and food marketing. I like to when I design studies to not just be investigating a problem, but try and build in ways of looking at solutions to address the problem.

So we've done some interesting experiments where we've done simulations of sponsorship. What if, for example, this is a kind of grassroots community sport, we replace the kit that kids are given at the start of their enrollment in Milo cricket or Macca's Little Athletics with a healthy sponsor. And we have found that if you apply those marketing principles to healthful products, they similarly build brand awareness, promote the appeal of the product.

And sports related marketing is really interesting, particularly in relation to junk food, because, you know, we all have in our minds an image of sport as a sort of healthy, vital kind of pursuit. And so, again, it's, it's deeply psychological, this sort of building these associations that every time a goal's kicked in the footy match, we zoom in on the Macca's logo on the fence, and so on. And it's sort of implicitly creating this notion of, you can eat crap as long as you burn it up with activity or whatever. And if there's a lot of that linkage, like there was a phase a while ago of pedometers given away with sugary breakfast cereal. But the other thing about sports sponsorship is it's a highly emotional context, and, you know, with persuasion, there are affective and cognitive components. And, and if we associate a brand with this sort of exciting event that people are invested in with attractive, fit, healthy athletes and celebs and so on, it's, it's a great kind of promotional strategy.

Cassie: But it also implies that the athletes are eating that food.

Helen: Yes. And that's another thing we've done research on is counter-advertising strategies. So if you actually direct consumers' attention upstream to exposing the marketing tactics of, of these harmful industries, be it gambling, tobacco, or, or junk food. We did another trial where around the NRL finals a couple of years ago, we knew they were gonna have heavy alcohol sponsorship. And we had a professionally produced ad that exposed and critiqued alcohol sponsorship, and we tested that against a traditional public health ad focusing on the downstream health harms of alcohol. And so we sent people links, and they watched this counter ad in the lead up to watching the alcohol sponsored event.

And we followed them up, and what we found was that the counter ad exposing industry marketing, it also had the kind of effect of promoting reduced intentions to drink alcohol, so it could potentially assist with curbing personal alcohol intake. But it also made the audience members more critical of the alcohol sponsor brands and view them less favourably, and they saw more of a mismatch between those products and the sport, and it increased their support for policy to restrict that form of marketing. So that's an interesting strategy.

Cassie: But on that, I mean, back when I was a kid, cigarette companies sponsored sport, which seems bizarre today, but that's just how it was. And, you know, in 10 years or so, do you think that's how we'll look at fast food sponsorship and advertising in, in sport?

Jane: I think we will. The leading burden of disease used to be tobacco. Now it's obesity, and then, you know, up there too is diet. So this is a really serious health problem, and we're setting our children up, using all these kinds of techniques in particular, for an unhealthy future. And 1 in 2 Australians are living with a chronic disease. So, you know, these are preventable diseases on the whole, that are, are growing, and they're starting at quite young ages, um, as well. So this is really problematic.

You know, half of women during pregnancy are above healthy weight. So there's epigenetic effects of that, and we know that it's similar to tobacco. We're getting this uptake, and the poor diets are really getting much worse during adolescence. Adolescents are targeted with this marketing and advertising. The social norms are very far away from, you know, healthy, nourishing diets and unprocessed foods. So we need to sort of start to tip this. And as we start to look to changing and denormalising ultra-processed foods, we will be looking to the same sort of techniques that were used in tobacco control, and they were, you know, around the marketing, and we know how powerful sport is for those, all those reasons we've just touched on.

It's just such, you know, a juxtaposition around the product. I mean, it's so clever. So that, and it doesn't happen in all countries. So those sorts of, um, relationships need to be blasted apart, and we really need to sort of shift our whole food system. It's a big change, but unless we do that, our health system will not be able to manage, you know, in the UK they've looked at the NHS and, and can it cope? It can't. We're in exactly the same boat. We won't have a healthy, productive workforce, and we won't have a, a health system that is able to do all the things that we'll need to do, even now, let alone if this continues. So I think the future is grim, unless the levers are pulled, and we know what those levers are. Marketing's a huge one, price is a big one, availability.

So all those kinds of things are important, and we need to look what does, what are those hard decisions that politicians will need to make to reshape our environment and support a healthy local food system. And stop the commodification. And really, these corporations are selling these products, they're not paying for the true cost of the outcomes that they are, uh, you know, that they are creating. So it's these externalities, like dental health and things. That are, you know, they're getting away with it right now. I just can't see that continuing because the economy just will not cope. So those times will come, I suspect.

Nick: it's big and it's scary and it's complex, but let's say you had a magic policy wand and you could change one thing, what would you do?

Helen: If you look at the Australian dietary guidelines or the healthy eating pyramid was what was used when we were kids. Now they have a, a circle that's a bit like a dinner plate. You know, it's these whole foods that are recommended, high in plant foods, lean proteins, etc. And off to the side, they have discretionary foods, which tend to be these sort of sweet and salty snack foods, chips, etc.

What we actually find, you know, people think, Oh, you, you know, you're being too serious. Kids just having the occasional treat. We actually know from our big nutrition surveys that about 40% of kids' daily energy intake is coming from these discretionary foods, which are really recommended to be kind of sometimes foods, not everyday foods. And we also know from research monitoring, food marketing. That basically, the food marketing environment is the healthy eating pyramid tipped upside down, and, and so these energy dense, nutrient poor discretionary foods that we're meant to be eating the least of are the most heavily promoted.

We've also done a recent research, uh, looking at school canteen menus and finding that these foods are cheaper too, and, and particularly in Australia with the high cost of whole foods and groceries at the moment. That would be my wish that we reconfigure food settings and so on to nudge consumers to healthy options.

Jane: Now, one of the reasons we're not getting the, um, traction that we need is because of the power of corporate interests. It's the same as in climate change, and the emphasis is put back onto the individual. We've been talking exactly how the individuals, you know, how would the individual assesses something as being hijacked through, you know, understanding the psychology of how, how humans interpret information and make decisions, so I think, we really need to see some pushback against these commercial interests. They're making profit out of this. I mean, why they want to sort of slowly poison their consumers, I'm not sure, but what we've seen is these cheap ingredients, making these foods which are also very cheap. They're very heavily promoted.

So we need to rebalance, and the only way to rebalance is to use these regulatory levers. I think that's the only way we'll see change. And it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the baby toddler space. This is a little subset of these, you know, processed and packaged, some less processed foods, but it would just be interesting to see how that might change, um, the market.

And it will incentivise and once you get that economy of scale, it creates new opportunities for industry and innovation to occur, and I think that's really important, but if you just rely on individuals to change their behaviour, it's not gonna work. 9 in 10 adults, and the same with kids, aren't eating a healthy diet. So, and it's not because they're not trying or don't care. That's absolutely not why that's happening. It's everything else in the mix. So we shouldn't keep on pushing individuals to change. We have to make the environment supportive of them having healthy diets, and they need healthy nourishing food to be able to do that.

Cassie: Until we get to that space where the system is healthier, what can individuals do, just in terms of, is it slowing down when they're shopping and not falling for those marketing traps? What can we do? I know we shouldn't be pushing the burden onto the individual consumer, but until that system level change happens, what can our listeners kind of take into their grocery shopping?

Helen: Well, if they've got time, obviously, whole foods, you kind of know what you're getting, and, and we talked earlier about the issues with product composition, but for packaged food, you want to be sure that what it says on the front of the pack matches what's actually in there. But there are some strategies if you've got time to look at the ingredients list. Often the length, the, the number of ingredients or the number of numbers in the ingredients is a bit of an indicator that it's a highly processed product.

I mean, there's a degree of processing of food, but the ultra-processed food, it tends to go hand in hand with being high in nutrients of concern like salt and sugar, it being energy dense and nutrient poor is what we often say. So short ingredients list, comparing the column that compares key nutrients, both beneficial and, and nutrients of concern, per 100 gram, you can look at those sorts of attributes. But, um, I think if it has ingredients that you wouldn't find in a real person's pantry, just in a factory, that's a bit of a telltale sign.

Jane: We've got some great campaigns they could join if they want to make changes. So we've got our campaign around healthier food for kids, which is called Kids are Sweet Enough. Sign up. We've got another campaign about protecting children from unhealthy food marketing. We've got a paper going to the Health Minister on the feasibility of regulation. So it could be on the table. We've got Jamie Oliver and others who've supported that call for action. You know, that is a place to, to come to where we're at the Food for Health Alliance. So we, we'd love to engage with people who feel passionate and would like to see change around those two things.

Cassie: Thank you for sharing with us, Helen and Jane. And listeners, if you're wanting more information about today's topic, we'll put some links to Helen and Jane's work and campaigns in the show notes. But thank you, both of you for joining us today.

Helen and Jane: Thank you.

Cassie: You've been listening to PsychTalks with our wonderful guests, Associate Professor Helen Dixon and Jane Martin. We'd like to thank them for today and you, our listeners at home, for coming along for the ride for another great season. If you'd like to show your support, please make sure you're a subscriber, and we hope to be back here next year.

Nick: This episode was produced by Carly Godden with support from Mairead Murray and Gemma Papprill. Sound engineering by Jack Palmer.