Marketing and economics of food consumption choices in relation to health: a brief review.

Summary This article presents, in a non-technical way, some determinants of food behaviors highlighted by economics and marketing sciences. It is based on an exhaustive review of the literature, conducted within the framework of a collective expertise led by the INRA in which we actively participated. We point out a certain number of obstacles to the promotion of health-oriented eating behaviors. First, we recall that consumers' hedonic preferences are, in the short term, unstable, highly contextual and manipulable: brand, promotion and packaging can be used to modulate choices. Interest in health is another important preference parameter. It varies according to social class, gender and age. Certain segments of the population therefore give much more weight to pleasure than to foresight in their behaviors, for reasons that are sometimes embedded in their social affiliation (for example, social norms of corpulence). Beyond preferences, perceptions of risk and the way in which information is processed are biased by the cognitive limitations of consumers. Consumers often rely on simple heuristics, which in a world of information abundance has unexpected consequences. For example, consumers may be extremely sensitive to a detail (a nutritional claim, for example) that allows them to process the available information quickly, but very incompletely. Finally, time and budget constraints limit their ability to change. In the end, far from the image of a consumer who is sovereign and free to make his own choices, economics and marketing converge to portray a consumer who is largely subject to his environment, whether in his preferences or in his constraints.