Effects of Food Labeling

Increasingly, city and state governments are pressuring fast food restaurants and coffee shops to label the nutritional content of their food — calories and sodium are high on the list.

The debate surrounding the move has sent people to their habitual postures. Businesses have claimed that the burden of regulation will hurt their bottom line. Conservatives have charged regulators with fostering a "nanny state," and some knee-jerk patriots have gone so far as to say that Americans want and deserve high-fat foods. Foodies have shown stereotypical disdain for the whole fast food enterprise.

So ... what happens when the laws actually go into effect? A new study [pdf] conducted by Stanford University researchers had some interesting results (H/T Corby Kummer).

By looking at the effects of labeling in Starbucks, it hit the foodies where they live. (I can't even count the number of corporate-hating liberal elites I know who patronize Starbucks without so much as a re-usable mug!)

The study found that, overall, labeling calories caused consumers to reduce the number of calories in their purchase by six percent. People who had been buying the highest-calorie items reduced their calories by 26 percent, suggesting that they didn't know — or at least pretended not to know — what they were getting.

The changes were in the food items, not in the coffee. Which goes to an under-addressed but central part of our diet in the U.S.: The excessive accessibility of snack foods. You go into Starbucks planning to buy a coffee — an intent that doesn't change. But there's that delicious baked good right at eye level as you pay, and as you're idly eyeballing it, the clerk asks, "Did you want any baked goods?" It's like you're a weirdo for just buying the coffee. This is where you make your irrational choice.

Of course, Starbucks and other businesses know all about that, and it's why they fear losing revenue when they also put the calorie count right in your face. But, in the Stanford study, the coffee king's profits didn't suffer. And labeling prompted Starbucks to make some moves toward improving the nutritional quality of its food, making 2 percent milk its default selection for coffee drinks, for instance.

And that, argues Kummer, is the real intent of labeling laws. After all, if you can make a delicious scone by adding a pound of butter, two tablespoons of oil, and 16 grams of sugar without the customer knowing it's no ordinary scone, you've got yourself a win-win — with the costs externalized to public health. But if you've got to tell them what they're buying, the equation shifts towards the informed, rational consumerism that pro-business conservatives love to tout.

Photo credit: D3 San Francisco