Sustainable Diet Dimensions. Comparing Consumer Preference for Nutrition, Environmental and Social Responsibility...

Area of Science:

• Food science and consumer behavior
• Sustainable food systems analysis
• Nutritional science and labeling impact

Background:

• Global food systems face challenges from unsustainable and unhealthy practices.
• Food labels can influence consumer choices towards sustainability.
• Understanding consumer valuation of different label attributes is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare consumer response to nutrition information versus environmental/social responsibility information on food labels.
• To explore how consumers value different elements of sustainable diets.
• To identify preferred food labelling attributes for sustainable food choices.

Main Methods:

• Systematic literature review across six databases.
• Quality assessment of studies using domain-based criteria.
• PRISMA guidelines followed for reporting.

Main Results:

• Thirty articles involving 19,040 participants were included.
• Environmental and social responsibility attributes were preferred over nutrition in 17 studies.
• Organic labelling was the most preferred attribute, likely due to health inferences.

Conclusions:

• Consumers generally respond positively to environmental and social responsibility food labelling.
• Combined labelling approaches, integrating multiple sustainable attributes, show significant potential.
• Further research is needed to address sample biases in existing studies (e.g., educated females).