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

• Published in: Preventive medicine reports Vol. 36; p. 102478
• Main Authors: Hswen, Yulin, Moran, Alyssa J., von Ash, Tayla, Prasad, Siona, Martheswaran, Tarun, Simon, Denise, Cleveland, Lauren P., Brownstein, John S., Block, Jason P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01-12-2023; Elsevier
• Subjects: Calorie; Health policy; Menu labeling law; Public opinion; Regular article; Sentiment analysis; Twitter; Calorie; Sentiment analysis; Twitter; Health policy; Public opinion; Menu labeling law
• ISSN: 2211-3355; 2211-3355
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pmedr.2023.102478

•Changes in public sentiment towards restaurant chains were monitored by Twitter.•Calorie Labeling had a short-term impact on sentiment toward restaurant chains.•Negative sentiment toward restaurant chains after calorie labeling attenuates over time.•Public sentiment toward restaurant chains does not change over the long term.•More efforts to change the sentiment toward unhealthy restaurant chains are needed.
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.