ABSTRACT This paper investigates how consumers use and understand nutrition information on food labels in their daily lives. Primary data were collected from a survey (1127 Portuguese consumers) and four focus groups exploring dissimilarities among consumer segments: a) nutrition-concerned adults; b) adults non-concerned with nutritional issues; c) young consumers, aged 15–18; d) less educated and older consumers. A mixed-methods approach was crucial to further understand consumers’ preferences for labels and to identify obstacles to their use. Data evidence that consumers prefer symbolic, coloured, and simple, FOP schemes and that ‘traffic light’ schemes are better understood and result in faster decision-making at points of sale. By collecting data on how different consumer segments search, understand, like, and use food labels, this paper provides rich guidelines to agri-food practitioners’ future actions, particularly retailers. It also reveals serious interpretation obstacles faced by consumers, which needs to be revisited by policy-makers on nutritional labelling and inform decisions on a national scheme. Lastly, it further strengthens existing models by setting that some influencing dimensions are related to the idiosyncratic nature of the subject (consumer) and others are related to the object itself (label format), neither of which has been explored in the literature.

中文翻译：

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消费者对食品和营养标签的态度：对国家决策者和从业人员的影响

摘要本文研究了消费者在日常生活中如何使用和理解食品标签上的营养信息。原始数据来自一项调查（1127名葡萄牙消费者）和四个焦点小组，探讨了不同消费者群体之间的差异：a）营养相关的成年人；b）不关心营养问题的成年人；c）15-18岁的年轻消费者；d）受过良好教育的消费者和年龄较大的消费者。混合方法方法对于进一步了解消费者对标签的偏爱并确定其使用障碍至关重要。数据表明，消费者更喜欢使用象征性，彩色和简单的FOP方案，并且可以更好地理解“交通灯”方案，从而可以在销售点更快地做出决策。通过收集有关不同细分受众群如何搜索，理解，喜欢和使用食品标签的数据，本文为农业食品从业者，尤其是零售商的未来行动提供了丰富的指导。它还揭示了消费者面临的严重解释障碍，决策者需要在营养标签上重新审视这些障碍，并为国家计划的决策提供依据。最后，它通过设置某些影响维度与主题（消费者）的特质有关，而其他影响与对象本身（标签格式）有关，进一步增强了现有模型，这在文献中都没有探讨过。