November 1, 2018 — Shoppers will buy larger quantities of seafood – both sustainably certified and non-certified – when given information about eco-labels, new research has found.
Using previous surveys that had evidenced that price and taste matter most to people when they buy seafood, and also that shoppers have a tendency to buy the same products as friends and family members, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) decided to test what would happen if store customers were told that lots of other shoppers bought Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) labeled seafood.
Isabel Richter’s doctorate in environmental psychology at NTNU explored how people could be motivated to eat more sustainable seafood. She was granted permission to carry out an experiment in grocery stores in Norway and Germany.
Richter started by first putting up a sign with information about the MSC label on the seafood cooler. The cooler included salmon and cod both with and without the MSC label, with similar prices and weight.
In the next trials, she put up eight different signs with an image and label information – plus some wording telling shoppers that a percentage of the customers who shopped at that particular store chose to buy seafood with the MSC label.
Four of the signs said that more than 50 percent of the customers in the store selected eco-labeled products, while the other four signs said that less than 50 percent of customers did this.
In the Norwegian stores, about 70 percent of the products were not labeled. In Germany, the MSC eco-label is more widespread so several products included it.