Design for ethical food choices: analyzing the opportunities and challenges of smartphone applications in promoting sustainable consumer behavior

In recent years, there has been growing awareness of the ethical implications of food choices, particularly regarding sustainability, environmental impact, animal welfare and health (Benthem de Grave et al., 2024). Despite many consumers expressing a desire to align their eating habits with ethical values, they struggle to make informed and consistent food choices. Factors like socioeconomic constraints, product availability, personal preferences, and the complexity of the food system itself often result in compromises that deviate from ideal decisions (Agyemang et al., 2024). Digital technology, particularly smartphone applications, has emerged as a powerful tool to support individuals in navigating these challenges. They offer users instant access to information about the ethical implications of their food choices, and provide real-time data on product sourcing, nutritional content, environmental impact, and other considerations, allowing users to make more informed decisions in line with their ethical priorities. While apps designed for health-related diet tracking have garnered significant attention and adoption, those focused on broader ethical aspects of food choices are still in the early stages of development (Haas et al., 2022). There is a growing need to explore how these apps are designed, how effectively they address consumer needs, and what opportunities and challenges exist in their widespread adoption. This paper aims at bridging this gap by examining the design characteristics of the most popular food purchase apps, and offering an in-depth analysis of the opportunities and challenges they present for effective implementation. The study contributes to a broader understanding of how digital technologies can be leveraged to promote ethical food purchasing and consuming behaviors and is preparatory to define the aesthetic, typological and functional characteristics of new products aimed at supporting ethical food consumption behaviors. The methodology used in this research combines both quantitative and qualitative approaches by applying the Mobile App Rating Scale (Mauch et al., 2015). First, the most downloaded and higher rated mobile applications related to food purchasing will be identified: will be included those apps written in English, subscription free and with a high user rating. These apps will be then coded to capture their design characteristics, by using the four domains of the above-mentioned MARS scale: engagement, functionality, aesthetics, and information. The findings aim to evaluate design characteristics of mobile applications and how they influence food purchase behaviors. Aspects under analysis will be the presence of customized recommendations, gamification, real-time feedback, integrated learning modules, and also the quality of interfaces, contents, navigability and all features useful to engage users effectively, and to maintain long-term user engagement – that today remain a big challenge as many users abandon apps shortly after download if they do not see immediate results (Moiz Riaz et al., 2023). Based on the findings, the paper will provide recommendations and design strategies for food purchase technological artifacts. Design choices will be demonstrated to be essential in ensuring that the app’s core features are easily accessible, in optimizing the learning process, in motivating users to engage with the app through personalized contents and integrated long-term strategies.