Testing the Effects of Singapore's Front-of-Pack Healthier Choice Symbol Label With or Without a Physical Activity Equivalent Label

The HCS is intended to improve diet quality by signaling to consumers which products are healthier options within a specific category (e.g., which are the healthier biscuits or the healthier beverages). Manufacturers must meet category-specific criteria before a product can display the HCS and an associated tagline. The labels were displayed at the bottom of the product images.

"For the study, we designed a simple PAE logo (Appendix Figure A1) and added a description encoded into the NUSMart user interface to ensure that participants would understand the contents of the label. Participants saw the following description whenever their cursor hovered over the PAE label: The Physical Activity Equivalent (PAE) refers to the number of minutes that a typical adult would need to jog to burn off the calories associated with one serving of the product. Previous studies have shown this labelling approach to be effective.~The labels were displayed at the bottom of the product images."