Food Pricing Biases may effect your Health.

The other morning I was inspired by the question, why are fresh foods measured in kilograms and manufactured per 100 grams?

Although I am not 100% sure this is entirely accurate, it does seem to represent a common theme in the fresh food verse non fresh food market place.

Typically your fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, nuts, grains are all sold by the kilogram.

Sauces, can foods, confectionery are sold by their product weight and more often than not will have per 100 gram comparison.

I think it has lots to do with profitability and the use of physiology of numbers to drive sales in higher margin products. Some may argue you buy fresh food in larger quantities

thus the larger price per weight, but that is not necessarily true either.

There is a physiology of numbers and its been used in pricing for many years.

People infer more of something from larger numbers, 1000 mg of vitamin C compared to 1 gram. Or 660 minutes of talk time compared to 11 hours.

While unit size can influence behaviour it is more influential on future related events. The cruise is for 3 weeks holiday compared to 21 days, makes it seem longer. While repayments are just 36 months seems less than 3 years seems less.

Numerical order also plays a role in price marketing. Larger numbers up front create the appearance of more. Such as, 70 items for $29 compared to $29 for 70 items.

Calculation difficulty also matters. 70 for $29 is more appealing than 41c each. Where a less difficult calculation of 40 for $20 or 50c each is less of a challenge and is seen as identical.

So in a nutshell, if we used the physiological biases mentioned above and applied it to fresh food pricing and manufactured food pricing. We may discover that fresh food would be seen as very inexpensive. Here are a few examples.

Lets reverse some typical pricing: