Sustainability Marketing Can Make Food Seem Healthier, Review Finds

A Green Label Can Make Food Seem Healthier—Even When Its Nutrition Has Not Changed

A sustainability message on a food package can quietly alter how healthy the product appears, according to a systematic review of experimental research. Environmental, ethical and socially responsible claims—including “vegan,” “fair trade,” “recycled,” “eco-friendly” and sustainability scores—often encouraged consumers to judge a product as healthier, even when the label provided no information about calories, fat, sodium or other nutritional properties. The review, published in SSM–Population Health, describes this perceptual spillover as a sustainability-driven “health halo,” a cognitive shortcut that may influence food choices without changing the food itself.

The finding matters because food packaging is becoming an increasingly crowded communication environment. Shoppers may encounter nutrition labels, environmental scores, recycling claims, animal-welfare certifications, climate-impact messages and corporate responsibility statements on the same package. Each cue is intended to communicate a particular attribute, but consumers do not necessarily keep those attributes separate. Instead, a positive impression in one domain can spread to others, creating an overall sense that a product is “good.” In the case of sustainability claims, that general impression can become an assumption about healthiness.

The review was conducted by Agnese Palvarini, David Stuckler, Martin McKee and Courtney McNamara using a systematic search designed according to PRISMA reporting guidelines. The researchers searched the Web of Science Core Collection and PubMed for peer-reviewed empirical studies available through 16 February 2026. Their search initially identified 3,757 records. After duplicates and ineligible publications were removed, 2,714 records underwent screening, 233 articles were assessed in full, and 25 studies met the final inclusion criteria. Together, these studies examined how sustainability labels or claims affected health-related judgments among adults.

The included experiments covered a wide range of messages. Some tested environmental labels such as Eco-Scores, carbon-footprint information or climate-impact statements. Others examined fair-trade claims, vegan labels, sustainable-agriculture certifications, recycled-content claims, eco-friendly packaging, rescued-food messages and corporate social responsibility statements. Most studies were conducted online, and 19 used randomised designs in which participants were shown otherwise similar products with or without a sustainability cue. The evidence base was geographically concentrated: 13 studies came from Europe and eight from North America, while most research was conducted in a single country.

Across the 25 studies, the researchers extracted 43 separate outcome observations because individual experiments often measured more than one form of perception. Twenty-four outcomes, or about 56 percent, showed robust effects. Nineteen of those were positive, meaning that a favourable sustainability-related cue increased perceived healthiness. Four outcomes followed the direction of the cue, with positive sustainability information improving judgments and negative information worsening them. One outcome showed a negative association. Fourteen outcomes were null, while five produced partial, inconsistent or otherwise heterogeneous patterns.

The clearest signal appeared in general health perceptions rather than precise nutritional judgments. Of 30 outcomes measuring perceived healthiness, safety, naturalness, quality or related broad evaluations, 15 showed a positive effect. Eight were statistically non-significant, while the remaining outcomes included opposite, negligible, negative, partial or inconsistent effects. This pattern suggests that people are more likely to use sustainability as a shortcut when answering a broad question such as whether a product seems healthy than when estimating a specific property such as its calorie content.

Several individual experiments illustrate the effect. In a Belgian study, a “100% recycled” packaging claim increased perceptions of healthiness, naturalness and quality. In a US laboratory experiment, potato chips carrying the statement “Made with Renewable Wind and Solar Energy” were rated as healthier than identical chips without the claim. A German study found that a positive Eco-Score increased perceived healthiness, while a negative Eco-Score reduced it. Other research reported similar effects for fair-trade labels, vegan labels, rescued-ingredient claims, environmentally friendly labels and corporate social responsibility messages.

The apparent halo did not operate consistently in every situation. In Chile, an environmental warning describing a product as having a high environmental impact reduced perceived healthiness, whereas a label stating that more than 80 percent of the packaging was recyclable increased it. In Germany, a certified sustainable palm-oil label was associated with lower perceived healthiness than a health-oriented comparison claim. Carbon-footprint information also produced different results depending on the food and the way the information was presented. These findings indicate that the emotional tone, familiarity and perceived meaning of a label can be as important as the sustainability attribute itself.

Nutrition-related judgments were less uniform. Among 13 outcomes involving perceived calories, fat, sodium, protein, vitamins or overall nutritional value, four were positive, four were statistically non-significant, three were partial and two followed opposite patterns. A fair-trade claim on chocolate, for example, led participants to estimate fewer calories. Corporate social responsibility claims increased perceived nutritional value and lowered estimated calories in one study. By contrast, sustainable-agriculture certification on cookies did not significantly change perceptions of nutritional properties, and a sustainability facts label on milk did not alter calorie estimates, although it produced a small increase in expected protein content.

This difference between broad and specific judgments is consistent with theories of heuristic reasoning. Evaluating a product’s overall healthiness is cognitively demanding but vague: consumers must integrate incomplete information about ingredients, processing, portion size and nutrition. A salient positive cue can therefore serve as an efficient substitute for detailed analysis. Specific nutrient estimates are more constrained by existing knowledge and by visible nutrition information, making them less susceptible to an unrelated environmental or ethical message. The same process may also draw on the widespread “natural-is-better” bias, in which naturalness, purity and environmental responsibility become associated with safety and health.

The review also found that context changes the strength and predictability of the effect. Sustainability labels presented alone produced robust effects in 10 of 15 studies, compared with three null and two heterogeneous results. When sustainability information appeared alongside nutrition labels, warnings or other product cues, heterogeneous outcomes became more common. A German experiment that displayed Nutri-Scores and Eco-Scores together found that a positive Eco-Score increased perceived healthiness for some foods, while a negative Eco-Score did not consistently lower it. Multiple labels may create cognitive competition, reducing the influence of any one cue, or may direct attention toward more familiar nutrition information.

The researchers caution that the review does not demonstrate that sustainability claims change actual consumption or improve health outcomes. Most studies measured perceptions using rating scales in online settings, not purchasing or eating behaviour in supermarkets, restaurants or homes. Only a small number used field settings, and most included studies were judged to have a moderate risk of bias. Randomisation procedures and measurement reliability were not always fully reported. The evidence may also be affected by publication bias, because studies reporting striking or statistically significant effects may be more likely to appear in the literature than studies finding no halo.

The review excluded studies focused exclusively on organic labels because organic products occupy a special conceptual space. Consumers commonly interpret organic certification as a signal of environmental responsibility, naturalness, food safety and personal health at the same time, making it difficult to isolate a purely sustainability-based effect. Children and adolescents were also excluded, so the findings apply primarily to adults. The authors further note that searching only Web of Science and PubMed may have missed relevant work from marketing, psychology and behavioural economics, where similar phenomena may be described using terms such as product evaluation, consumer inference or attribute-based judgment.

Even with these limitations, the findings raise a policy concern: sustainability communication can imply nutritional benefits that are not supported by the product’s composition. A package may be environmentally preferable yet high in sugar, salt, saturated fat or energy. If a green colour, an ecological score or an ethical claim causes consumers to overlook those characteristics, the label may unintentionally distort health-related decision-making. The authors frame this problem within the commercial determinants of health, a framework describing how corporate strategies and market environments shape the conditions in which people make health-related choices.

The result is not that sustainability labels are inherently misleading or undesirable. Environmental information can help people reduce the climate impact of their diets, and foods that support planetary health may sometimes also align with healthier eating patterns. The challenge arises when a claim about one attribute is allowed to stand in for evidence about another. Stronger standards for substantiating sustainability claims, clearer separation between environmental and nutrition information, and more consistent label designs could reduce confusion. Future research will need to test whether the health halo observed in controlled experiments changes what people actually buy and eat, particularly when sustainability and nutritional quality point in different directions. As green claims become a routine feature of food marketing, the review suggests that consumers may be judging more than the label explicitly says.