A new study published in Ecological Economics analyzed more than 1.7 million food orders at three university cafeterias in Germany and found that labels indicating attributes such as climate, health and animal welfare have little impact on consumer behavior. Overall, dishes with these labels were not chosen more often, and in some cases they were chosen significantly less often than their unlabeled counterparts.
The researchers compared the share of labeled dishes with the total number of orders each day over three years. They note that findings from food-service menus cannot be generalized to other settings, such as supermarket labels, and do not establish a causal relationship between labels and purchasing decisions. Germany also has stricter climate and animal welfare laws than the US, as well as a different cultural context.
Andrew DeCoriolis, executive director of the nonprofit Farm Forward, says that “we can finally abandon the idea that environmental labeling alone will get people to make better choices.” As he explains, people face a very clear psychological trade-off between seeing something as ethically focused and also finding it affordable and tasty.
The study’s follow-up assessments suggest that consumers subconsciously associate animal welfare with “tastier” food, but also with higher prices. So when someone is standing in a cafeteria line and needs to decide quickly, cost may matter more than the abstract ethical impact. David L. Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, says consumers respond more strongly to attributes that offer personal benefits, such as taste, health benefits and price, than to those that offer public benefits, such as climate change mitigation or animal welfare.
When it comes to supermarket shopping, Mara Miele, a professor of human geography at Cardiff University, agrees that other factors often take priority over concern for animals, such as putting an affordable dinner on the table that the children will enjoy. Labels, she says, “cannot work on their own”; they need a context that creates the conditions for success, such as better taste and a distribution system that makes products visible in key places.
Culture also plays a role. DeCoriolis points to the French Agriculture Ministry’s “Label Rouge,” which signals higher production standards and has achieved a larger market share than certified organic products in some sectors. He says its success is partly due to its association with a belief: that French poultry raised in better conditions tastes better. People draw on different identities—their gym community, their cooking community or their French identity—to make purchasing decisions, and environmental labels are not enough to do this.
Labeling also, by definition, places the responsibility on consumers to choose a more ethical product. DeCoriolis believes this is the wrong approach to broader change: “We know we can change eating behavior and keep diners satisfied,” he says.
Many of people’s choices can be shaped; the question is why institutional food-service operators are not implementing these strategies on a larger scale. Choice architecture has considerable influence: research has shown that making vegetarian food the default, with the option to actively choose nonvegetarian food, can increase the selection of vegetarian dishes by up to 85%, and participants are almost twice as likely to choose a plant-based option if it appears first on the menu.
For Miele, however, the market will not shift toward better animal welfare practices without changes at the production level. If farmers earn higher profits from products with better welfare standards, animal welfare will improve and market share will grow. “At the moment, most improvements in animal welfare come at a cost to farmers,” she says; if technological innovations help farmers perform better, there will be more animal-friendly products.
Policy can drive these changes and improve affordability, notes Daisy Freund, vice president at the ASPCA. In the US, industrial livestock farming is heavily subsidized by the government, while farms with better welfare standards receive almost no support; “it should be the other way around,” she says.
In recent years, 15 states have passed legislation to restrict or ban intensive animal confinement. California’s Proposition 12, for example, bans the extreme confinement of breeding pigs, egg-laying hens and calves raised for meat, and has repeatedly survived constitutional challenges from meat industry groups.
DeCoriolis observes that while consumers’ support for better animal welfare does not always translate into purchasing decisions, it does show up at the ballot box. “When you ask voters about welfare as a collective question of values, they make a choice that will raise their prices. When you ask them to make that choice in a supermarket again and again, the outcome is different,” he says. If we want to ban certain livestock farming practices, that must happen at a collective political level.
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