Adolescents' food packaging perceptions. Does gender matter when weight control and health motivations are considered?

•Food packaging for adolescents worried about health.•Food packaging for adolescents worried about weight control.•Informative versus visual packaging cues.•Gender differences in packaging relevance.

This paper investigates, first, to what extent adolescents highly involved in food are more worried about weight control and health than less involved adolescents. Second, it studies the impact of both food choice motivations on food packaging relevance, considering both, visual and informative packaging cues. Finally, these relationships are re-tested in two different frameworks: men and to this end, 589 adolescent consumers between 14 and 17 years were questioned. The interviews were done personally by an external company at the door of 30 different schools. Our results have confirmed the relevance of packaging informative cues over visual cues for adolescents highly worried about weight control and health. Women are significantly more involved in food than men, being also more worried about weight control and health than them. Even more, women pay significantly more attention than men on informative cues when they choose a food to control weight.

Graphical abstractThe relevance of the packing under weight control and health concerns.Download full-size image