Some like it healthy: Can socio-demographic characteristics serve as predictors for a healthy food choice?

• The choice of foods with health claims depends on personal relevance and interest in healthy eating.
• Trust in the message is responsible for the information effectiveness.
• Presence of children and country of residence are predictors of sensitivity for health claims.
• Gender predictive capability is mainly attributed to the type of benefit associated with the food.
• Age and education do not prove to influence the choice of foods with health claims.

Authorising new health claims in Europe will favour the diffusion on the market of a greater number of foods with health claims. This scenario presents new opportunities to promote healthy food choices and launches new challenges to define strategies aimed at promoting products on the market. The literature suggests that our understanding of consumers’ sensitivity to health claims is still fragmented and should be further investigated. Our objective is to study the relationship between choice behaviour, attitudes and socio-demographic characteristics in order to evaluate the effectiveness of consumer characteristics in predicting consumers’ choice of products with health claims. Towards this end, we have conducted a choice experiment for extra-virgin olive oil on a sample of Danish (n = 1024) and Italian (n = 1000) consumers. Applying the latent class approach has enabled us to identify a niche of individuals sensitive of health claims and to characterise them with respect to the rest of the population. The results supply insights for the development of more targeted health promotion campaigns, as well as for actions in food marketing.