Do eco-scores help consumers make better choices?

Have you ever bought something labelled ‘ethical’, ‘local’, or maybe ‘environmentally-friendly’, or even with a ‘low carbon footprint’ claim, and then thought: this tastes better too?

If so, you are not alone. There is actually a growing body of research to show that eating food that aligns with your values can actually taste better. Regardless, it will likely make you feel better.

Food companies know this. In fact, some of them understand you, your choices and your triggers better than you do. And this is one of the reasons they cannot resist greenwashing: if you are prepared to pay more for something that, in your mind, tastes better and makes you feel better, it matters not whether the food actually is better.

One of my favourite studies on this topic was conducted in 2013, but provides a glimpse of the power a ‘green halo’ can have on our decision-making.

Researchers at the University of Gävle in Sweden conducted a “fun” experiment in which students were given two cups of coffee: they were told one was ‘eco-friendly’ and the other was not. Most said they preferred the taste of the eco-friendly one but both coffees were in fact identical. 

Half the participants were also told they had preferred the non-eco-friendly option and those that placed a high value on sustainability said they’d still pay more for the eco-friendly coffee despite not liking it as much.

The study showed not only the power of eco-labelling but also the “greenwashing potential”, the researchers told me in 2021. So, imagine what the world’s major food brands and their huge marketing budgets could do – and indeed some are doing – with customers willing to open their wallets wider for greener products and few rules to ensure over-enthusiastic claims remain on a tight leash.

Research by McKinsey, a consultancy, and Nielsen IQ, a market research company, has for example showed that products making ESG-related (environmental, social and governance) claims accounted for 56% of all growth across five years of US sales spanning 44,000 brands, including many in food and drink. Products making multiple claims also grew twice as fast as those that are marketed with only a single claim. 

That was in the US; the chances are that the actual purchasing decisions people make would be even more significant here in the UK because, statistically and historically, Brits have been more sensitive to environmental and social issues than Americans. But are we being suckered rather than making sustainable decisions when grocery shopping or eating out?

The truth is, yes – sometimes we are. And definitely more than we would like. The Advertising Standards Authority, which is the marketing watchdog, is checking thousands more adverts and claims using artificial intelligence (rather than waiting for complaints about ads to be emailed in to their team). Still, it is pretty easy to compile claims that fall foul of the rules and ignore the Green Claims Code, written by the Government’s regulator on these things, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

A couple of years ago the CMA was all fired up about tackling greenwashing, and now has new powers to fine companies in the millions of pounds. But in recent months its crack team of eco-claim experts have stayed fairly quiet. This surely has nothing to do with a former Amazon UK and Amazon China manager being appointed CMA chair in January… !

Eco-score helps us shop sustainably

Our Wicked Leeks glossary of greenwashing is hopefully providing you with a steer regarding some of the tactics that companies are using, but what if there was a universally agreed label that showed us how sustainable food is?

The concept of a holistic ‘eco-score’ has been hotly debated since carbon labels came unstuck. Measuring carbon emissions is important – and it’s not always easy to tell a high carbon product from one with a lower footprint – but they are a bit of a one trick pony. What about animal welfare, pesticide use, water, soil health? Or the recyclability of the packaging? Or fair pay? For some of us these are equally, and in some cases more, important factors in the food choices we make.

As you can imagine, wrapping all these different environmental and ethical aspects into an easy-to-understand score is complicated. But it’s not impossible. There is already an ‘Eco-score’ label available on thousands of products, although it has recently been rebranded ‘Green-score’ following a complaint from the European Federation of Organic Agriculture – they had concerns about whether ‘eco’ confuses the score with ‘organic’.

Supermarkets in France and Germany have given these labels a go, as has Lidl in the UK. They are far from mainstream, though. Another trial, started in 2021, used Foundation Earth’s label – which, like Green-score, is based on a scale of A to E (A being most sustainable). Its Eco Impact label, which the likes of Abel & Cole, Meatless Farm and Finnebrogue have tried, is now used on 200 products in the UK. 

The pace appears to be picking up. Twelve months ago, Foundation Earth formed an alliance with EIT Food, an EU-funded food innovation community, to “kickstart” major new investment into environmental labelling. 

It’s certainly something people have long said they want. A survey of 10,000 European citizens by EIT, for instance, shows that more than two-thirds are craving some kind of universal label showing the impact of the food they buy – a label that might not be perfect but that they can trust.

There are over 450 sustainability logos in operation, with many companies using green claims and eco-labels to help market their products, but no universal standard for them, explained Klaus Grunert, Professor at Denmark’s Aarhus University, and director of the EIT Food Consumer Observatory. This leaves “many consumers confused”, he added.

A holistic, centrally-certified and trustworthy eco-label is enticing, preventing information being semi-deliberately withheld by companies. An intensively-reared chicken marketed as ‘low carbon’ would quickly become a less attractive option if other impacts of the production are accounted for in an overall score, for example.

Would it help us choose the more sustainable option, though? 

Research just published in the journal Appetite suggests it would. Dieuwerke Bolhuis and her colleagues from Wageningen University, The Netherlands, assessed the effectiveness of the Eco-score labels by asking people to indicate the most sustainable food out of two options from similar food categories, in two online choice tests. For example, frozen strawberries and frozen blueberries, salmon fillet and cod fillet, and ketchup and mayo. Reaction times were also included as an additional, “more objective” measure to explore respondents’ ease of identifying sustainable products (decisions are generally made in seconds at supermarket shelves, for example).

They found that consumers rely on the labels to correctly select more sustainable options. “[…] without Eco-score, the overall mean correctness score was 52 % (the change rate of selecting the most sustainable food out of two). With Eco-Score, this improved to 72 %,” they wrote.

They also found that a simple one-letter version of the label (on a sliding scale of A to E) is “at least as effective” as the full traffic light version, “and might even be more understandable, especially for the lower-educated population”. 

Indeed, in the EU the Nutri-score label for nutritional information uses traffic lights, as do many brands here in the UK on packs, so a similarly colour-coded eco-label could either prove familiar and help people understand the new marque, or too familiar and create confusion between the two.

The academics discovered confusion in other ways, too – for example when those involved tried to compare meat and plant-based alternatives. The choice between plant-based mince and organic minced meat proved tricky, which is in line with previous research showing that “people generally underestimate the environmental impact of animal products”.

A label would help us untangle some of these trade-offs, but leaving it all up to us as we shop is unlikely to really shift our food system and our diets in the ways we need to. And even if we can (finally) agree on a universal label for food, debate over the scores will rage for years to come.

As Gemma Butler, founder of the ‘Can marketing save the planet’ podcast, has said on this topic: “You’ve got to ask the question – given the critical situation we are in, if a product is red, why is it on the shelves at all?”