**1. Introduction**

The growth of diet-related diseases is becoming an important societal concern and a challenge for a more sustainable society [1]. As a result, today, consumers are aware that their diet a ffects their health and so prefer to choose food that helps them to have a healthy lifestyle. [2,3]. This has contributed to the development of important trends in food consumption, which has seen, amongs<sup>t</sup> others, the growing consumer interest towards foods with natural and health claims attributes [4]. The category of food with health claims includes food enriched with healthy components, such as polyphenols, vitamins, and other healthy components [2], while natural food is food without additives and human interventions, considered by consumers harmful for their health [5].

The Kamp ffmeyer Food Innovation Study [6] revealed that food naturalness is a decisive buying incentive and that the majority of the consumers perceived a strong connection between "natural" and

"healthy." Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that consumers living in developed countries prefer natural foods over the conventional ones, as they are considered to have positive health effects [7]. Similarly, foods with health claims have registered a growing market success. According to the latest available data [8,9], 27% of global respondents, on average, are very willing to pay a premium price for health claims. This percentage is slightly higher in western countries and particularly in the U.S., where the majority of consumers believe that health claim foods give real benefits in improving and maintaining overall health, and nearly 30% indicate that they buy products with health claims on the labels [10].

The growing consumers' interest towards these product characteristics has pushed the food industry to provide healthier products [11,12]. The use of health as a selection criterion has already been offering new possibilities to the food market and continues to provide new challenges for producers [13]. One of these challenges for the food industry is to give consumers product options with a natural and healthy image.

From a consumers perspective, interest shown towards these two attributes (natural and health claims) is due to the common will of consumers to improve or maintain their health, although the two attributes have different exceptions [14]. Health motivations as factors for purchasing natural and health claim products have already been investigated in several studies [14,15]. However, to the best of our knowledge, consumer preference over the two types of attributes is not ye<sup>t</sup> completely clear.

The present study tries to reduce this gap, by analyzing consumer preferences for the attributes natural and health claim, and exploring the drivers affecting consumer choices for both attributes. Knowing which attribute is more valued by consumers could give important indications to the food industry more oriented to provide products with a health image. Furthermore, understanding the drivers behind consumer preference could be useful for planning successful marketing strategies for those enterprises oriented to satisfying those consumers' needs.

Based on these premises, three objectives have been set in this study: 1. to investigate which attribute, between natural and health claims, is more appreciated by consumers; 2. to explore the drivers behind consumers' choice for both health attributes, and 3. to verify whether the price premium of two types of attributes is explained by common factors.

To answer these research questions, the present study used a laboratory experiment in order to derive the consumer's willingness to pay (WTP) for natural and enriched attributes. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: after the introduction, Section 2 explains the theoretical framework and consumer choices on healthy products in Hungary; Section 3 shows the data collection and methods; Section 4 presents results and discussion and, finally, in Section 5, we conclude, and the study limitations are provided.
