The unhealthy-tasty intuition for online recipes – When healthiness perceptions backfire

An increase in obesity rates has caused policymakers and marketers to promote a healthy lifestyle by advertising healthy recipes. However, despite the general awareness of the importance of healthy eating, little is known about consumers’ responses to healthy recipes. This study tests a common heuristic in the field of healthy foods, namely, the unhealthy-tasty intuition, in the new context of online recipes. An online experiment (representative sample in Austria in terms of age and gender) and a real-world study advertising an online recipe with various labels (healthy, tasty and neutral) confirm the unhealthy-tasty intuition and reveal that healthy recipes have a negative influence on behavioral intentions. Both health and taste inferences serve as underlying mechanisms explaining the influence of healthy recipes on behavioral intentions. The negative effect of a health label can be eliminated when adding a taste label as well. From a practical perspective, marketers are advised to include taste cues that stimulate taste expectations in the healthy recipes that they advertise, thus boosting healthy eating habits among consumers.