Speaker
Description
In this presentation, I will start with three fundamentals of food choice that I regard as important for achieving behavioural change. First, food choice can be made both under high and low involvement conditions, and the degree of conscious elaboration in food choice will therefore vary. Second, any food choice is only an element in a series of food choices over time, and any food choice has consequences that will have an impact on future food choices. Third, taste is still the prime factor in the development of food preferences. Based on these premises, I will discuss the role of information in food choice. Information has always been used as a quality cue predicting the taste experience that is unknown at the time of purchase, but with the increasing role of credence characteristics like health and sustainability, information has received a much broader role in food choice. How this role plays out depends among other factors on the degree of involvement both during food choice and during food consumption and how information-based food choices align with subsequent taste experience. I will discuss consequences of these mechanisms for behavioural change in the food area, both by providing information like in labelling schemes, and by changes in the choice environment.
