Abstract:Exploring the gaps of the awareness and the usage of food nutrition information between urban and rural consumers is important to identify food nutrition deficiencies in rural areas, and it is of great significance to fill the food nutrition and safety depression of vulnerable groups in rural areas. Based on a large sample of consumer questionnaire data in China and applying the seemingly unrelated regression model and propensity score method, this paper investigated the gaps of the awareness and the usage of food nutrition information between urban and rural consumers and analyzed the influencing factors by the Oaxaca-Blinder method. Results show that, in general, the awareness and the usage of food nutrition information are low with significant difference between urban and rural consumers. After considering the correlation between information awareness and the usage, as well as the potential sample self-selection bias, the gap is still significant. In addition, heterogeneity estimation results show that the urban-rural gap is significant for female and high-income consumers, but not for male and low-income consumers. Furtherly, discrimination effect also exists in the gaps of the awareness and the usage of food nutrition information between urban and rural consumers, accounting for 41.65% and 51.05%, respectively, indicating that the consistency of food nutrition information with rural residents was low, and rural areas faced obvious information discrimination. To reduce the gaps, this paper suggests strengthening normative review of nutrition information in rural areas, implementing differentiated policies, and enhancing food nutrition education and training.