An assessment of food claims situation and consumers' intention towards food claims usage in Singapore.

Abstract

Due to the diet-related disease threat, worldwide policy makers have been promoting the usage of food claims to help consumers make more healthy good choices. However, past studies have focused on the West and little is known about the situation in Southeast Asia. In this paper, we seek to exam0ine the prevalence of major food claims at supermarkets of Singapore, to find out the typically misleading claims among them, and further investigate factors that predict local consumers’ intention to use food claims in the context of retail food shopping. Our study comprises of two parts: a content analysis of package good labels widely available in Singapore supermarkets and a shop intercept survey based on extended model of Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). The results of content analysis suggest the prevalence of various food claims as well as problems; in the survey, we used an extended TPB model to predict consumers’ intention to use food claims. Implications for research and practice are discussed.