Abstract
Research report written in the context of the Interreg Alpine Space European Project 'AlpFoodway' Information typically reported in labels is to a great extent is dictated by law and does not enable consumers to make informed choices. They tend to obscure, rather than clarify, differences in product quality – including those based on the product’s heritage. The narrative label is a project started by Slow Food in 2011, which encourages to go beyond legal requirements for labels and add precise information on producers, their firms, the plant varieties or animal breeds employed, cultivation techniques, breeding and processing, animal welfare and areas of origin. Differentiating heritage products from rival offers is necessary for heritage farmers, animal breeders and artisan food producers. Thanks to differentiation, consumers, retailers, and other channels will be willing to pay fair prices that compensate for their more costly production methods. Larger and more industrialised producers however typically have better marketing skills and more sizeable marketing budgets than heritage producers. This results in storytelling approaches based on romantic clichés that are resonant with consumers, but that often do not represent these producers’ current production practices. Smaller producers, whose material production conditions are more strongly rooted in an area’s heritage, find it difficult to compete with more industrialised products which are less expensive, better promoted, and look produced in similar manners. These forms of symbolic appropriation make it more difficult to differentiate heritage products and justify their price. Labels and packaging can indeed constitute effective instruments to inform consumers about how the product was made and its links to local terroir, culture, and traditions. They can contain storytelling elements, and thanks to QR codes they can link to multimedia narrations hosted on websites and social media. Adopting a narrative approach to labelling can permit to influence consumers at points of sales during their comparison of purchase alternatives and successfully differentiate heritage products from lower-priced alternatives.