The healthier the food, the faster it goes bad. Or so people think.
A study finds that fears about spoiling keep consumers from buying—and eating—healthy food.
A healthy diet is a goal for many consumers, but a recent study found something that can deter people from eating more healthy food: They worry about it spoiling.
Consumers tend to believe that foods labeled as healthy will go bad faster than other foods, the study found, which could lead them to choose less-healthy alternatives in the store or throw out healthy food they bought that hasn’t actually spoiled.
More than 3,500 consumers in Canada, South Korea, the U.K. and U.S. participated in the eight-part study, which was conducted from 2018 to 2024.
Confused consumers
One part of the study examined six food products—cereal, snack bars, protein bars, yogurt, crackers and chips—and had consumers rank the items they perceived to be the healthiest and those they thought would be the quickest to expire. It found that the food perceived as the healthiest was also ranked as the first to expire.
Consumers know that some healthy foods, like produce, go bad quickly, and they tend to apply that experience to healthy packaged foods, the researchers believe. “That’s because there is a lack of knowledge about food spoilage," says Jeehye Christine Kim, an assistant professor of commerce at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia and a co-author of the study.
The study found that food labels with unclear wording about spoilage worsen the problem. To test the effect of labels, the researchers studied consumers in the U.S. and found they were more likely to buy healthy food if it had a label like “Consume By" versus a more ambiguous label like “Packaged On."
“There are so many different types of labels food manufacturers use, and consumers are unclear about what they all mean," says Brent McFerran, a marketing professor at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business and a co-author of the study. The dates on many unclear labels are interpreted by most consumers as the last day the food is safe to eat, he says, “which is usually wrong."
Going to waste
The study also found that people are more likely to throw away healthy food when it is nearing its expiration date than they are to dispose of other foods at that point. That can lead to a lot of food being wasted, the researchers say.
“A lot of perfectly healthy food that is safe to eat is often tossed in the garbage because of a lack of knowledge people have about how long food is safe to eat," says McFerran. “While it’s easy to know when fresh produce goes bad, figuring out when packaged and can foods are still OK to eat is a quandary."
The researchers suggest marketers of healthy foods need to use clearer wording on their packaging to help consumers understand how long the food will be safe to eat. And the Food and Drug Administration should help by establishing clear and consistent rules for the expiration labeling of all foods, McFerran says.
Lori Ioannou is a writer in New York. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
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