zero pu“Carbon food labels have limited effects on grocery shopping behavior: Evidence from a randomized experiment”

Engineering notes

The results show that the information treatment significantly increases label awareness and leads to small but positive effects on attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and intentions to consider the climate compatibility of food purchases.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为端到端自动驾驶、BEV感知、3D目标检测、轨迹预测、路径规划、LiDAR感知等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Demand-side food policies are increasingly recognized as important tools for aligning consumption patterns with climate change mitigation targets, and carbon food labels have attracted growing attention as a potential policy instrument. However, evidence on their effectiveness remains mixed, and causal evaluation results from assessing the effects of carbon food labels in real-world supermarket settings is scarce. This study presents evidence from pre-registered randomized field-embedded survey experiment with behavioral outcomes, combining a representative sample of 2,372 Swiss residents with transaction-level purchasing data covering more than five million daily food purchase decisions made by 1,601 consumers over several years. In collaboration with one of Switzerland’s largest grocery retailers, we evaluate the causal impact of an information treatment designed to increase awareness of one of the world’s first carbon food labels implemented in grocery stores on both stated preferences and revealed purchasing behavior. The results show that the information treatment significantly increases label awareness and leads to small but positive effects on attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and intentions to consider the climate compatibility of food purchases. When tracing these effects into revealed purchasing behavior, the treatment also affects actual food purchases, but effects are modest and heterogeneous across food categories. Rather than inducing broad shifts away from meat consumption, the information treatment primarily leads to a higher overall share of labeled products purchased, increased purchases of labeled convenience products, and a partial reallocation within meat consumption (e.g., lower beef and higher pork purchases). We find no evidence of substantial reductions in overall meat purchases or large cross-category substitutions toward plant-based foods. While heavy meat eaters do not react negatively to the treatment, men and more right-wing individuals show a modest behavioral backlash. Overall, the results suggest that carbon food labels capacity to substantially alter habitual food consumption patterns in stimulus-intensive retail environments is limited and should be thus complemented by additional demand-side measures.

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