Matching customer cravings with appropriate labels

When you create food labels in order to successfully advertise your product, you need to keep your customers’ prejudices and needs in mind. It’s important to focus on the nutritional content of your product, but at the same time, your business might not want to ignore any overwhelming biases that your base might already possess.

One perhaps unsurprising predilection that consumers might have, according to a recent study that appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is sugar. There’s already been some concern circulating around that sugar is addictive, and anyone who subscribes to that belief might support any kind of anti-sweetener campaigning.

Is there any way that companies can acknowledge this in a productive way without having to change their contents?

The study centered around more than 100 teenage subjects, who were given different flavors of milkshakes to rate how much they felt compelled to eat after consuming them. This measured the amount that ingredients like fat and sugar stimulated the areas of the brain that might lead to addictive eating behavior.

The New York Times quoted Dr. Eric Stice, the study’s lead author, on how insidious the compulsion to eat sugar can be.

“What is really clear not only from this study but from the broader literature over all is that the more sugar you eat, the more you want to consume it,” he said.

With the right equipment, companies can research and develop an approach for how to make a label that doesn’t turn people away and keeps the focus on the way your product can help them.