The Effect of Ingredient Images on Baby Food Packaging on Healthiness Perception, Tastiness, Attitude, and Purchase Intention: An Abstract

Early childhood is a very sensitive area; health professionals are alerting the most vulnerable young people about what to eat. All European parents are looking for healthy baby food products and rely on facing packaging to assess the healthiness level and quality of products. Visual elements are more memorized than textual, for example, ingredient images depiction are very often used by baby food designers in order to better characterize the product's composition. Nevertheless, regulations are very poor and this depiction is not framed. Parents can use ingredient images as a heuristic to evaluate their quantity in the product recipe and can be misled because of perception bias. Therefore, the biased perception on baby food product triggered by the format in which ingredients depicted in the front of pack are represented (namely cut vs. whole) is investigated. Our research is in the field of consumer behavior, sensory marketing and young children's health, and considers the effects of graphic depiction bias on packaging on baby food product evaluation in several countries. To study the effect of ingredients images design, we conducted an experiment in 3 European countries within parents of babies 10-36 months old assessed the format of ingredient on front-of-pack of a fruit and cereal bar on perceived fruit quantity in the recipe, healthiness, tastiness, attitude towards the product, and then purchase intention. Our results highlight that Front of pack depicting cut ingredient images increases purchase intention via the increase of attitude towards the product and via the increase of perceived product healthiness and tastiness induced by more perceived fruit proportion in the product recipe. This research highlights the effect of format of ingredient depiction on product evaluation and the bias perception. We propose a standards suggestion for public policy on food labelling and on ethic positioning of baby food manufacturers.