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People Think They’ve Found an Easy Way to Make Better Food Choices. A New Study Says They’re Fooling Themselves
Bill Murphy Jr.
4–5 minutes

I recently interviewed a Life Story Magic customer who grew up working in her family’s general store in the 1930s. One detail stuck with me: her family bought goods in bulk and packaged individual portions only when customers came in.

For example, if a customer wanted cheese, they’d cut a slice from a giant wheel of cheese.
Or if customers wanted grain, they’d scoop out the amount they wanted from a giant bag and put it in a smaller one.
Oh, and for beer — customers came in with their own containers, and they’d fill them from a giant barrel.

No boxes of cereal with cartoon characters, no “settling of contents may occur” and of course, no “best before” date on the packages.

It sounds quaint — and maybe the kind of thing that gives us nostalgia for a time few of us probably experienced.
A proxy for quality?

Today, some shoppers are using shelf life as a shortcut to judge how natural their food is. The shorter the shelf life, the thinking goes, the less processed the product.

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But that’s a bit of a mistake, Yann Cornil, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, told me this week.

Writing in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Cornil and his colleagues, Dan Liu of Jinan University and Xiaobing Xu of Hainan University, conducted a series of experiments in which they presented participants with products that were similar except for their shelf lives:

Potato chips with 5-month and 9-month shelf lives;
Pasta sauces with 1-year and 3-year shelf lives;
Granola bars with nearly identical ingredients and nutrition information but different shelf lives;
Mayonnaise, where participants the longer shelf life came only from a better jar seal.

By and large, participants rated food products with shorter shelf lives as more natural, and those with longer shelf lives as better for the environment.

But, there’s a problem. Shelf life simply isn’t a reliable proxy for naturalness. A longer shelf life can simply mean better packaging.
‘Completely transformed foods’

In the United States alone, “more than 60% of calorie intake comes from ultra-processed foods,” Cornil told me, adding:

“It’s completely transformed foods—when it’s on your plate, or in the packaging, it looks nothing like the original ingredients.

And even though there’s no clear causal evidence of it, there are strong correlations between the consumption of ultra-processed foods and some health issues, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease.”

Consumers are very concerned, and they are right. Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to assess the naturalness of food. There is no clear label.”

His suggested starting point is simple: “Having a look at the ingredient list is probably more diagnostic than having a look at the shelf life.”
How about rotisserie chickens?

One thing I’ve learned reporting on these issues: what a food label tells shoppers can change their behavior in ways that aren’t obvious.

Case in point: a recent Stanford University Graduate School of Business study trying to figure out the best way to sell rotisserie chickens in a grocery store.

Result: a 35-page academic paper with a 50-page online appendix, built around a mathematical model that pointed to a surprisingly simple approach.

Stop showing prepartion dates on chickens. Instead, sell the freshest ones first: last-in, first-out (LIFO). (The catch: in their model, reducing waste required stores to keep chickens on the shelf longer.)

Somewhat surprisingly, they concluded, while some portion of the chickens would expire before they were sold, average quality would increase.

And that would lead to greater demand — which would ultimately lead to less waste.

Which brings me back to that general store, and a question worth asking today: how much can the packaging really tell us about the food inside?

“As long as food is properly stored and unopened,” Cornil said, “it’s still perfectly fine to eat your cereals, or even your milk, shortly past the best before date. You just have to taste it or smell it, and you will quickly notice if food cannot be eaten.”

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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