(Un)Healthy Perceptions in the Food Industry An Empirical Test of the Expensive = Healthy intuition.

Consuming a healthy diet throughout life helps to prevent malnutrition in all its forms as well as a range of chronic diseases and conditions. In order to stimulate the consumption of healthy food, it is of great value for marketers and policy makers to understand how consumers evaluate product healthiness. Even though consumers infer product healthiness from multiple intrinsic and extrinsic cues, this study focusses on price as a heuristic cue for the evaluation of food healthiness. Recent research suggests that consumers believe more expensive food is healthier than less expensive food, even in situations where this is not objectively true. This research aims to test for this finding, hence the ‘expensive = healthy’ intuition. In addition, this study investigates whether a debiasing intervention, aimed at raising awareness on this heuristic, could counteract the ‘expensive = healthy’ intuition. In order to test for this relationship and the possible effect of a debiasing intervention, a survey experiment is conducted. The analysed data, obtained from 122 respondents, indicate that price has no significant effect on healthiness perception. Furthermore, the results of this study show that the debiasing intervention has no significant moderating effect. These results provide contradictory insights on the effect of food prices on healthiness perception, for which the limitations of the experimental design should be taken into account. This study may help policy makers and marketers to make better informed decisions, without relying naturally on the presence of an expensive = healthy heuristic.