Prompting food safety responsibility: Does it influence consumers’ choices of food safety campaigns?

Abstract

Communicating food safety and risk information to consumers is essential to reducing the incidence of foodborne illness. However, despite widespread public health campaigns, behaviour change remains limited. This study investigates whether framing individual responsibility in campaign messages influences consumers’ stated preferences for food safety campaigns. Using a web-based discrete choice experiment with 2343 Scottish adults, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: a control group (no prompt), a treatment with a statement-based responsibility prompt or a treatment with a question-based prompt. Respondents completed a series of choice tasks evaluating hypothetical campaigns that varied by delivery channel, timing and message style, alongside an opt-out option (“no campaign”). Results show that question-framed prompts significantly increase the likelihood of choosing a campaign over the opt-out, relative to both the control and statement conditions. While the overall effects are modest in magnitude, they are consistent with prior evidence on the cognitive and motivational impact of question-based framing. These findings suggest that simple, low-cost message framing strategies, particularly those encouraging reflection and self-persuasion, can enhance the perceived effectiveness of public health campaigns and may support improved food safety communication design.