SUSTAINABILITY SEALS ON SPECIALTY COFFEE LABELS: FROM VISUAL ATTENTION TO PERCEPTION

Introduction Climate change increasingly challenges coffee production, reinforcing the need to communicate sustainable, socially responsible, and traceable practices to consumers. Seals can summarize complex production attributes, but their effectiveness depends on consumers noticing and interpreting them positively. Objective To investigate visual attention and consumer perception toward sustainability-, social-responsibility-, and origin-related seals on specialty coffee labels. Methodology A focused secondary analysis was conducted using three Brazilian specialty coffee labels containing such seals, selected from a broader label study. The labels included organic certification, family-farming and cooperative socioenvironmental emblems, sustainable-production certification, and geographical-origin identification. A total of 105 regular specialty coffee consumers evaluated the labels. Visual attention was recorded by eye tracking and expressed as Normalized Fixation Ratio (NFR) for predefined informational Areas of Interest. Purchase intention was measured on a seven-point scale. Consumer interpretation was further assessed using Text Highlighting (TH) and Free Listing (FL). Results Eye tracking showed that seal-related informational categories could strongly capture attention. On Label 1, social-appeal marketing presented the highest NFR, followed by sustainability, while on Label 3 social appeal was also the most attended category. TH showed particularly strong responses for Label 1: sustainability was highlighted by 84% of consumers and positively by 77%; social appeal was highlighted by 74%, although 20% also marked it negatively. Across the three labels, origin/traceability cues tended to show more consistent relationships with product value than broader socioenvironmental messages. FL indicated that seals contributed to product perception but competed with sensory information, quality indicators, and visual-design attributes. Conclusions Sustainability-related seals attract consumer attention but do not automatically become dominant purchase drivers. Their effectiveness appears to depend on clarity, credibility, and integration with concrete product information, providing insights for communicating sustainable practices in a coffee chain increasingly exposed to climate-related challenges.