Frontiers in Nutrition · 3 authors, 2 centres
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This online experiment with 137 participants tested how health claims on healthy dessert options affect purchase intention. It found that health claims prompted positive health inferences but also unfavorable taste expectations, leading to lower purchase intention, contradicting the unhealthy-tasty intuition.
The study used a serial multi-categorical mediation model to test the effects of health and sensory claims on purchase intention for healthy desserts in a dining-out context. While health inferences increased purchase intention (b1=0.25, p<0.01), the negative indirect effect through taste expectations (a3b2=-0.53) was stronger than the positive indirect effect through health inferences (a1b1=0.23). The sensory claim had no significant effect on taste expectations. Limitations include the online, hypothetical scenario and potential measurement sequence effects. The findings suggest that health claims may backfire by reducing taste expectations, highlighting the complex role of cognitive inferences in food choice.
