Extending animal welfare labels to plant-based foods promotes animal-friendly food choices

Plant-based foods are essentially animal-friendly, yet they are rarely labelled as such. We examined whether extending animal welfare labels from only being displayed on animal-based foods, towards also being placed on plant-based products, would better integrate plant-based products into the set of options consumers consider animal-friendly. Across two studies in a simulated online supermarket, we hypothesised that extending animal welfare labels to plant-based foods would promote animal-friendly choices via increased perceptions of physical opportunity to choose animal-friendly (i.e. availability of animal-friendly foods) and social opportunity to choose animal-friendly (i.e. social norms for choosing animal-friendly foods). We show that extending animal welfare labels to plant-based foods not only promoted animal-friendly choices within the animal-based category, but also significantly increased the number of plant-based foods chosen by 28% compared to the control condition, and 33% compared to the condition in which only animal-based products were labelled. Furthermore, we show that the positive effects of extending animal welfare labels to plant-based foods persisted even when consumers were exposed to multiple sustainability messages presented through a multidimensional label, which displayed animal welfare, biodiversity, and climate scores. The studies confirmed that label effects on animal-friendly choices were driven by increases in perceived physical and social opportunity to choose animal-friendly. Extending animal welfare labels to plant-based foods is an effective strategy for encouraging animal-friendly food choices. Labels, it turns out, do more than inform: they reshape how consumers perceive the very context — physical and social — in which that choice is made.