The Federal Menu Labeling Law and Twitter Discussions about Calories in the United States: An Interrupted Time-Series Analysis

The impact of the federal menu labeling law on the sentiment of Twitter discussions about restaurants and food retailers: An interrupted time series analysis

The US federal menu labeling law, implemented on May 7 th 2018, required that restaurant chains post calorie counts on menu items. The purpose of this study was to analyze the change in public sentiment, using Twitter data, regarding eight restaurant chains before and after the calorie labeling law's implementation. Twitter data was mined from Twitter's application programming interface (API) for this study from the calendar year 2018; 2016 and was collected as a control. We selected restaurant chains that had a range of compliance dates with the law. Tweets about each chain were filtered by brand-specific keywords, and Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) sentiment analysis was applied to receive a continuous compound score (-1-1) of how positive (1) or negative (-1) each tweet was. Controlled Interrupted Time Series (CITS) was performed with Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Regression on 2018 and 2016 series of compound scores for each brand, and level and trend changes were calculated. Most restaurant chains that implemented the federal menu calorie labeling law experienced no change or a small change in level or trend in sentiment after they implemented labeling. Chains experienced mildly more negative sentiment right after the law was implemented, with attenuation of this effect over time. Calorie labeling did not have a strong effect on the public's perception of food brands over the long-term on Twitter and may imply the need for greater efforts to change the sentiment towards unhealthy restaurant chains.

Analysis of Content, Social Networks, and Sentiment of Front-of-Pack Nutrition Labeling in the European Union on Twitter

In recent years, concerted political efforts have been made at the national and European Union (EU) level to promote the consumption of healthy foods. The European Commission (EC) expressed the need for a harmonized and mandatory front-of-pack nutrition labeling (FOPL) system at the EU level. The EC will adopt the proposal by the end of 2022. Our research work aims to understand the public discourse on FOPL in the EU via Twitter, by analyzing tweet content, sentiment, and mapping network characteristics. Tweet search and data collection were performed using the Twitter application programming interface (API), with no time or language restrictions. The content was coded with the QRS Nvivo software package and analyzed thematically. Automatic sentiment analysis was performed with QSR Nvivo, and network analysis was performed with Gephi 0.9.2. A total of 4,073 tweets were posted, mostly from the UK, Spain, and France. Themes that have emerged from the discussion on Twitter include the types of food labeling, food industry, healthy vs. unhealthy foods in the context of food labeling, EU regulation, political conflicts, and science and education. Nutri-Score dominated the discussion on Twitter. General topics were perceived negatively by Twitter users with more positive sentiments toward the food industry, while negative sentiments were observed toward the discourse of political conflicts. The network analysis showed that a centralized communication was hardly existed between countries. Our results reveal that the discussion of FOPL on Twitter is limited to a very limited group of people, and it seems necessary to inform a wide range of consumers about existing and upcoming FOPL schemes. Educational programs should empower consumers to understand what a healthy diet is and how it relates to FOPL, regardless of the existing labeling system.