The Effect of Restaurant Menu Labeling on Consumer’s Choice: Evidence from a Choice Experiment Involving Eye-Tracking

Eating away from home has been noted to be a contributor to the rising obesity epidemic in the U.S. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced plans to require calorie information to certain food retail establishments. However, the effectiveness of such a requirement has been found to be mixed with the literature. The objective of this paper was to understand the role of various nutritional labels (i.e. calorie, percent daily intake, and traffic light signals) on food choice at both sit down and fast food establishments. Our results indicate that participants in the price only treatment chose meals with higher caloric content from both sit down and fast food menus. However, we find that calorie only information provides the largest reduction in calories in a meal from a sit down menu, but percent daily intake in conjunction with calorie information provides the largest reduction in calories for a fast food menu. Further, via eye tracking technology we find that participants looked at the nutritional information similarly across treatments