Consumers’ Attention Allocation on the Food Packages: An Eye-Tracking Study

Abstract

Processed food is very popular nowadays for its convenience, which helps people to save time. Moreover, its taste is generally satisfactory. The ingredient section and nutrition facts on food packages are important resources for consumers to access food health information. However, there are many other elements on food packages besides these. How people allocate attention when viewing food packages reveals their awareness of food health. To identify people’s gazing behaviors during food package visual processing, this study recruited 16 participants to view food package images. The process was recorded via an eye-tracker. The eye-tracking technology could provide quantitative and accurate data on people’s gazing behavior. The data could reveal people’s visual attention to the ingredient section and the nutrition facts. Apart from the whole nutrition facts table, some key items (e.g., the sodium content and calories), were also investigated. Statistical analyses showed that people paid significantly more attention to other elements on food packages instead of to the food health-related information, which indicated people had comparatively lower food health awareness. Food health awareness should be improved for the future. At the same time, to increase the exposure of the ingredient section and the nutrition table, the package design and layout could be modified, including increasing the font size or adding labels and images.