Evaluation of Flour Safety Messages on Commercially Available Packages: An Eye-Tracking Study

Wheat flour and baking mix have been associated with foodborne outbreaks and recalls, yet many consumers are unaware of the repercussions of consuming raw flour products. The objective of this study was to evaluate the accessibility of flour safety messages on commercially available packages and to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Foods 2022-09, Vol.11 (19), p.2997
Main Authors: Thomas, Merlyn S, Berglund, Zachary R, Low, Megan, Bryan, Isabella M, Soewardjono, Reyhan, Feng, Yaohua
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accessibility
Baking
behavior change
Consumers
Cookies
Data collection
E coli
Evaluation
Eye movements
eye-tracking
Flour
flour consumers
Food products
Food safety
food safety message
Food science
Grocery stores
Health aspects
Messages
Packages
Packaging
Pathogens
perceptions
Recipes
Researchers
Safety
Tracking
Wheat
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Summary:Wheat flour and baking mix have been associated with foodborne outbreaks and recalls, yet many consumers are unaware of the repercussions of consuming raw flour products. The objective of this study was to evaluate the accessibility of flour safety messages on commercially available packages and to identify consumer barriers to processing these messages. Eye-tracking technology was used to track the eye movements of 47 participants to assess their time to fixation (TTF) on the flour safety messages on 10 commercial packages. Notifications that were longer than one sentence were considered "long" messages, while notifications that consisted of only one sentence were considered short (S1-S5 and L1-L5). Only two participants (4.3%) found messages on all 10 packages. Highly accessible messages did not result in a high preference of presentation among participants. Most of the participants (98%) found the message on the S4 package, which correlated with the lowest TTF of 7.08 s. However, only 15% of those who found the S4 message chose it as their preferred message. Many participants who were interviewed said that they preferred messages that identified the reasoning for the warnings. They also preferred the messages that were well separated from other content on the package. Flour safety messages on the current packages are not effective to convey information and change consumer behavior. More science-based messaging strategies need to be developed to provide guidance for flour safety communication.
ISSN:2304-8158
2304-8158
DOI:10.3390/foods11192997