Label-checking strategies to adapt behaviour to design

Despite robust quality control procedures, labelling errors on fresh produce are estimated to cost the UK supermarket industry approximately £50million pounds per year in product recalls and wastage. Changing the format of the labels themselves is not a viable option. Instead, the challenge is to change or guide human operatives’ behaviour so that label printing errors do not go undetected during quality control procedures. To this end, a simulated label checking task was presented to naïve participants to compare more systematic and strategic methods of label checking. Two conditions in which behaviour was computer-led were compared with a control condition in which checkers adopted their own idiosyncratic checking method. The data indicate that the two computer-led approaches resulted in improved levels of accuracy. Pushing label checkers towards a more systematic approach would appear to be effective in reducing undetected label errors, and could lead potentially to significant financial savings and reduced