Intervention (Hidden)
The climate label and price promotion are designed in collaboration with the online retailer Oda, which is the largest Norwegian online grocery retailer. The products available in the choice tasks represent most minced meat products and alternatives available in Norwegian supermarkets in order to keep the choice situation as realistic as possible. We keep the product origin (Norway) fixed across all products to avoid any effects of country of origin on product choice, and the plant based protein sources are peas and fava beans, which can both be cultivated in Norway.
Treatment 1: Climate label
The climate label is presented as a green “pill” with the text “climate-friendly”, placed under the product name, next to the product picture. The placement was chosen because this is the area where information about the product is normally placed in the online store (the Oda app). The combination of placement and color makes the label quite salient, but more subtle than other attributes that normally will be of higher priority to the retailer and customer, such as price promotions or availability information. The plant based mince is the only option that is labelled as climate-friendly. This is because it is the only product with a climate footprint below the threshold of 4 kg CO2 eqv/kg product, which is the threshold for green label in Edenbrandt and Lagerkvist (2021), and is also in line with Oda’s existing classification of climate friendly recipes. To make the choice setting as realistic as possible, we do not include any further information about the climate label prior to the choice tasks, since this may make the label more salient than in a real setting. In the Oda app, it is not possible to click on labels, such as "organic" or "Nyt Norge" (a country of origin label for Norwegian sourced foods) to get more information, and we have kept this design in our experiment.
In the climate labeling literature, much of the effect tends to come from negative labels (or the red color in a “traffick light” style label) (Taufique et al, 2022). However, there are, to our knowledge, no examples of “negative” labeling of climate intensive options (red meat) being implemented in scale in a large food retailer. This could be because retailers are concerned with alienating customers, who might respond by taking their business elsewhere. A label on all products also introduces more complexity in terms of data availability to assess sustainability. To make the label more realistic, we have therefore chosen a label highlighting only the low emission alternative. Furthermore, it is interesting to study to what degree customers can be nudged to choose the most climate friendly alternative, most likely requiring a bigger leap than switching between animal proteins with different emission intensity.
Treatment 2: The rebate
The rebate is presented in the top left corner of the product image as a red circle with the rebate percentage in white. The rebate is fixed at 15 % and only applies to the plant based mince. This corresponds to the VAT on food products in Norway, and a removal of VAT for certain products, such as fruits and vegetables, has been proposed as a possible policy to promote sustainable (and healthy) food products (e.g. in the Green Party alternative budget for 2024). Fixing the rebate at this level therefore makes the results more interesting from a policy perspective. The new, rebated price is also presented with a red color, next to the crossed-out original price in grey. The rebate is implemented in such a way that the rebate is subtracted from the randomized prices in the choice experiment design.
Treatment 3: The label – price combination
In the combined treatment, the climate friendly option is presented both with a climate label and with a rebate label with new prices
Control: The control group undertakes the choice tasks without any label or rebates.