Nutritional and health benefits as the determinants of food choice in Polish consumers

Aims: The aim of the study was to find out how nutritional value, health benefits of foods and relevant information on food labels affect consumers' dietary choices and shopping behaviour. Methods: Data were collected using a questionnaire on a sample of 200 adult consumers, inhabitants of Poland's capital city. The majority were young, well-educated and almost equally divided into four income groups. Results: The study showed that only 12% of the consumers never took into consideration the health impact of purchased foods, while 42% were deeply aware of it. This behaviour was the only one significantly influenced by consumer income, while the others were determined by education level and gender. Consumers revealed that food labels had a rather low influence on purchase decisions. Half of them always looked for obligatory information such as brand, producer, expiry date or price, and only 2% of the sample never looked. In contrast, only 3%-6% always checked the list of ingredients, nutrition facts, and nutritional or health claims, while one third of the group did not. Consumers looking for this information were interested mostly in energy value, total fat content and presence of artificial additives. The smallest attention was paid to saturated fat and trans-fatty acid content. This behaviour was in line with the finding that understanding the impact on health of these fat components was generally low. Health claims perception differed depending on the type of claim: the highest regarded was lowering cholesterol level, followed by 'natural product' and boosting immunity. However only one third of the group declared that health claims influenced their purchase decision and the same proportion negated the impact. The perception of labelling schemes (e. g. GDA, My choice) was even lower, so this information had very limited influence on food choice. Conclusions: Nutritional and healthy values of foods were found to be rather weak determinants of purchase decision and food choice. Consumers should have better knowledge of food-nutrition-health linkages and different labelling formats, otherwise nutritional marketing tools are not useful for them in making healthy, informed food choices.