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Nutri-score Labelling in a UK Restaurant Setting: a Randomised Control Trial

Nutri-score Labelling in a UK Restaurant Setting: a Randomised Control Trial

Status
Completed
Phases
Unknown
Study type
Interventional
Source
ClinicalTrials.gov
Registry ID
NCT06923241
Enrollment
672
Registered
2025-04-11
Start date
2025-03-27
Completion date
2025-08-01
Last updated
2026-02-20

For informational purposes only — not medical advice. Sourced from public registries and may not reflect the latest updates. Terms

Conditions

Food Choice, Food Labelling, PME

Keywords

Nutri-score, PME, Food choice

Brief summary

An experiment exploring the perceived effectiveness of Nutri-score food labels with calorie labelling compared to calorie labelling only on food choice and consumption in a real-world setting

Interventions

BEHAVIORALmenu labelling type

Participants will be given a restaurant's menu with calorie information or a menu with calorie information and NS labelling.

Sponsors

University of Liverpool
Lead SponsorOTHER
University of Bristol
CollaboratorOTHER
Liverpool John Moores University
CollaboratorOTHER

Study design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Intervention model
PARALLEL
Primary purpose
PREVENTION
Masking
SINGLE (Subject)

Masking description

To attempt to reduce the likelihood of aim guessing, participants will be recruited to a study described as 'A study of consumer behaviour in different restaurants'.

Eligibility

Sex/Gender
ALL
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes

Inclusion criteria

* Can visit a restaurant in Liverpool city centre * Regularly eat food prepared out of the home (from restaurants, cafes, fast food etc., at least once a month) * Over the age of 18 years * Fluent English speaker

Exclusion criteria

* Pregnant/breastfeeding * You have been diagnosed with a current or historic eating disorder

Design outcomes

Primary

MeasureTime frameDescription
Perceived Message EffectivenessUp to 30 weeksAn adapted version of the University of North Carolina PME scale will be used to measure health concern, product attitude, and discouragement of item consumption in response to the food menu. Participants will be given the menu they ordered from to look at. All participants will answer 3 questions using a Likert scale ranging from 1 - 5 anchored by "not at all" and "a great deal". The mean response to the three items will be calculated. PME is used as an early indicator of a health message's potential to change behaviour (e.g., reduce selection of less healthy items). The scale has been used previously to identify the potential impact of food labels and is predictive of long-term behaviour.
Nutritional quality of each item and for the full mealUp to 30 weeksNutritional quality for meal choices will be calculated using the UK NPM scoring system. This calculates a score (continuous variable) for a product by deducting a total score for positive nutrients from a total score for negative nutrients. A lower score represents greater nutritional quality and a higher score represents poorer nutritional quality. We will calculate the mean NPM score weighted by energy content of items for each participant. This will ensure that the NPM score of main dishes will be weighted higher than that of starters or sides (assuming energy content of selected main is higher than any starters or sides), leading to a more representative overall NPM score for food orders. This will be done using the weighted.mean function in R. This function multiplies each value (i.e. NPM scores for individual items) by its corresponding weight (kcal content of individual items), sums all items and then divides this by the sum of the weights.

Secondary

MeasureTime frameDescription
NS label of each item selectedUp to 30 weeksA NS category value will be recorded for each item selected by participants (A,B,C,D,E)
Energy content of all food orderedUp to 30 weeksThe sum of energy (kcal) across all foods ordered for the meal will be calculated
Energy and nutrients consumedUp to 30 weeksResearchers will take pictures of plates before and after each item is given to participants. Researchers will estimate the percentage of each dish consumed. Participants will be asked whether they shared any of their meal with someone else and this will be taken into account when making percentage estimates. A random 10% of percentage estimates will be performed by a second researcher to measure reliability. Energy and nutrient consumption will be calculated by multiplying the total energy/nutritional content of food items selected/consumed by the estimated proportion of the item consumed. Nutrients explored will be salt, sugar, fat, saturated fat, protein and fibre.
Later intakeUp to 30 weeksThe morning after participants take part in the study, they will be emailed with a link to complete a dietary recall survey (via intake 24, https://intake24.co.uk/). Participants will report everything they ate after the study session up until they went to bed. They will be asked to provide as much detail as possible on what they had for dinner, snacks, and drinks after the study session. We will estimate based on data from Intake 24, later consumption (kcal, salt, fat, saturated fat, sugar, protein, fibre).

Countries

United Kingdom

Contacts

PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOREric Robinson

University of Liverpool

Outcome results

None listed

Source: ClinicalTrials.gov · Data processed: Feb 21, 2026