Imagine you’re in a supermarket, looking for a satisfying snack. If you were offered three snacks that were being promoted on taste, price, or health grounds, which one do you think you’d pick?
This question has always been pertinent to food & beverage companies. But it has become particularly pressing with current changes in how companies are able to market their products.
In particular, recent restrictions on “high fat, sugar, salt” (HFSS) products mean that these products can no longer be sold through multi-buy offers, promoted in high-traffic locations (aisle ends, website homepages), or advertised on TV before 9pm.
For many brands, these changes feel like walls closing in, and the corporate instinct is to treat regulation as a threat to manage.
But at CogCo, we have worked across regulated sectors globally, and used insights from design and behavioural science to develop solutions that help businesses grow whilst meeting regulatory requirements and protecting consumers’ interests.
The ImplicEat Experiment
With HFSS restrictions spreading, we saw an opportunity to investigate how confectionary business growth can be maintained by focusing on healthier, HFSS-safe product lines. And to find out whether tastiness, price, or health messages resonated most with consumers.
We ran an experiment with 445 participants, choosing between relatively healthy and unhealthy snack bar lines on a mocked-up grocery website (see the screenshot below).
Three groups saw a point-of-sale message under healthier products: either a health label ("Healthier Choice"), a taste label ("Packed with Flavour"), or a price promotion ("Buy 1 Get 1 Free"). A fourth group saw no message.
Participants made their selection, reported the drivers behind their choices, and even completed a reaction-time test that revealed their subconscious attitudes.
What we found was a gap between what consumers think drives their decisions and what actually drives their decisions.
- 97% of participants said taste matters most, yet taste labelling was least effective in improving healthier choices
- Only 23% of participants stated health drove their choice, yet health labelling was most effective – improving healthier choices by 23% compared to baseline
- Despite several participants having negative subconscious attitudes - towards healthier snack lines, 60% of them still chose the healthier snack when shown health messaging
These results are consistent with many behavioural studies showing that what customers say and what they do are not always consistent with one another. The messaging strategy most aligned with stated preferences produced the smallest effect, while a simple health label outperformed every other condition.
For brands navigating HFSS restrictions, this is encouraging. It suggests that straightforward, low-cost interventions at the point-of-sale can meaningfully shift behaviour towards new, healthier product lines.
Why This Matters Now
The findings from this study, alongside our work in financial services and sustainability, suggest that the same shifts creating pressure also create more space for effective, evidence-based approaches.
The opportunity lies in moving beyond compliance as the end goal. When businesses invest in understanding how consumers actually make decisions, not just what they report in surveys, they unlock new levers that drive desirable commercial outcomes whilst genuinely serving the consumer.
