Limited and unintended effects of climate, health, and animal welfare labels

Policymakers and practitioners widely introduce food labels to promote more sustainable consumption. However, evidence on their effectiveness in real-world settings remains limited. We analyze transaction data from three large-scale field studies in university canteens, comprising more than 1.7 million individual purchases aggregated to daily dish-level market shares. Using market share attraction models, we examine the association between climate, health, and animal welfare labels and consumer demand. Across specifications, labels are associated with either unintended or statistically nonsignificant changes in market shares. These patterns remain consistent across robustness checks, including specifications incorporating interaction effects and propensity-score weighting to address comparability concerns. Our findings suggest that menu labels, as currently implemented, may not effectively shift consumer choices toward more sustainable options. By providing large-scale field evidence, this study contributes to the literature on informational instruments and highlights the need for context-sensitive label design and research leveraging exogenous variation to establish causal effects.

Kiel Institute Experts