Zoekresultaten

Labels on food, what do consumers think

Is the green key standard the golden key for sustainability measurement in the hospitality sector?

This article describes a method for promoting sustainable business practices in the hospitality sector and focusses on energy usage in hotels. It raises questions about the actual impact of eco-labels on actual environmental performance.

The role of nutrition labels and advertising claims in altering consumers' evaluation and choice

Despite policy efforts, consumers' well-informed healthful choice is a challenge. Due to increasing number of benefit claims advertising taste or health front of pack (FOP), consumers face the dilemma to trade taste for health. To understand the mechanisms underlying food evaluation, this study investigates the health-pleasure trade-off and its effect on consumers' choice. 240 EU consumers took part in a taste experiment, after being presented with the product FOP. Half of the products carried a nutrition label FOP, respectively, reduced fat for potato chips, reduced sugar for cereal bars. Further, one third of the products carried health benefit claim, one third taste benefit claim, and one third no additional claim FOP. Attention to information and its effect on experienced taste, health perception and the buying intention were measured. The results show that the message displayed FOP altered consumers evaluation and choice. The effectiveness of the FOP message further depended on consumers' health motivation and the healthfulness perception of carrier products. The outcomes are summarized in a framework of health-pleasure trade-off. Current findings call for the establishment of standards to avoid the use of misleading information FOP.

Reclaiming the city from an urban vitalism perspective critically reflecting smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just city labels.

This article analyses four of the most prominent city discourses and introduces the lens of urban vitalism as an overarching interdisciplinary concept of cities as places of transformation and change. We demonstrate the value of using urban vitalism as a lens to conceptualize and critically discuss different notions on smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just cities. Urban vitalism offers a process-based lens which enables us to understand cities as places of transformation and change, with people and other living beings at its core. The aim of the article is to explore how the lens of vitalism can help us understand and connect ongoing interdisciplinary academic debates about urban development and vice versa, and how these ongoing debates inform our understanding of urban vitalism.

Learning to recognize human activities using soft labels

Human activity recognition system is of great importance in robot-care scenarios. Typically, training such a system requires activity labels to be both completely and accurately annotated. In this paper, we go beyond such restriction and propose a learning method that allow labels to be incomplete and uncertain. We introduce the idea of soft labels which allows annotators to assign multiple, and weighted labels to data segments. This is very useful in many situations, e.g., when the labels are uncertain, when part of the labels are missing, or when multiple annotators assign inconsistent labels. We formulate the activity recognition task as a sequential labeling problem. Latent variables are embedded in the model in order to exploit sub-level semantics for better estimation. We propose a max-margin framework which incorporate soft labels for learning the model parameters. The model is evaluated on two challenging datasets. To simulate the uncertainty in data annotation, we randomly change the labels for transition segments. The results show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art approach.

Overcoming consumer scepticism toward food labels: the role of multisensory experience

More and more information labels appear on the front of food packages, increasing the complexity of consumer decision-making and enhancing consumer scepticism toward food labels. It is important to evaluate the efficacy of information communicated to consumers. The experimental study among 209 Dutch consumers compared the effect of health and hedonic labels on consumer scepticism toward the labels and consumer responses to food products (apple juice and a chocolate cookie) under three presentation conditions (visual, visual-tactile and multisensory). The results demonstrated that consumers were more sceptical toward the hedonic label than toward the health label. The influence of consumer scepticism on product experience, product evaluation and purchase intention varied for different product categories. For a hedonic product (a chocolate cookie), the hedonic label had a more positive effect on consumer responses compared to the health label. The results also showed that the multisensory presentation reduced scepticism and enhanced product evaluation for the hedonic product compared to the visual and tactile presentations. The results suggest that multisensory experience may alter consumer scepticism toward food labels and thus product evaluation and consumer choice. Our findings can be useful for food manufacturers and policy makers in evaluating the efficacy of food labels and information presented on food packages.