Hernán Barahona, Stanford University

Sala de Postgrado

“Food Labeling: Effects of information on nutritional intake”

Abstract: This paper studies how the introduction of a regulatory label based on the nutritional composition of food affects supply and demand of products and their nutritional content. We study this problem in the context of Chile, where in response to a growing obesity problem, the government introduced a novel regulation in 2016 mandating food manufacturers to put warning labels on all of their processed food products that surpassed a certain level of calories, sodium, sugar, or saturated fat. We take advantage of a unique dataset containing all transactions and purchases for any food item sold by the largest supermarket chain in Chile to study how consumers and firms react to the new regulatory policy. Never before has such a large-scale food labeling regulation been evaluated, making our results relevant for the fight against obesity.