There is little agreement among governments, institutions, scientists and food activists as to how to best tackle the challenging issues of health and sustainability in the food sector. This essay discusses the potential of school meals as a platform to promote healthy and sustainable food behavior. School meal programs are of particular interest for improving public diet because they reach children at a population scale across socio-economic classes and for over a decade of their lives, and because food habits of children are more malleable than those of adults. Current research on the history and health implications of school meal programs is reviewed in a cross-national comparative framework, and arguments explored that speak for the need of a new developmental phase of school meals as an integrative learning platform for healthy and sustainable food behavior. Nutritional, social, practical, educational, economical, political, and cultural perspectives and challenges linked to the implementation of healthy and sustainable school meals are discussed. Finally, the need for long-term interventions and evaluations is highlighted and new research directions are proposed.

Food production is associated with various environmental impacts and the production of meat is highlighted as a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A transition toward plant-based and low-meat diets has thus been emphasised as an important contribution to reducing climate change. By combining results from a consumer survey, focus group interviews and an in-store field experiment, this article investigates whether Norwegian consumers are ready to make food choices based on what is environmentally sustainable. We ask how consumers perceive the environmental impacts of food consumption, whether they are willing and able to change their food consumption in a more climate-friendly direction, and what influences their perceptions and positions. The results show that there is uncertainty among consumers regarding what constitutes climate- or environmentally friendly food choices and that few consumers are motivated to change their food consumption patterns for climate- or environmental reasons. Consumers’ support to initiatives, such as eating less meat and increasing the prices of meat, are partly determined by the consumers’ existing value orientation and their existing consumption practices. Finally, we find that although providing information about the climate benefits of eating less meat has an effect on vegetable purchases, this does not seem to mobilise consumer action any more than the provision of information about the health benefits of eating less meat does. The article concludes that environmental policies aiming to transfer part of the responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to food consumers is being challenged by the fact that most consumers are still not ready to make food choices based on what is best for the climate or environment.

To understand the market for sustainable foods, it is important to allow for heterogeneous preferences. However, most studies of consumer preferences for sustainable foods only investigate average consumer preferences. They do not take into account that some consumer segments attempt to purchase as much sustainable food as possible, others are almost indifferent to the notion of sustainable food, and still others consider sustainable food a complete hoax. The aim of this study is to explore the preferences for various types of premium eggs across three consumer segments. We conduct a choice experiment including 900 Norwegian consumers and perform a behavioural segmentation based on the frequency of organic food purchase. We find that the segment purchasing the most organic food is, as expected, willing to pay a significant premium for organic eggs over eggs displaying only enhanced animal welfare. However, most consumers, who only occasionally purchase organic products, are unwilling to pay more for organic eggs than for enhanced animal welfare eggs, suggesting diminishing marginal utility for additional attributes. We find that a third consumer segment attempts to avoid organic eggs, even when they cost the same as other eggs. Our findings suggest that organic products will be unsuccessful in acquiring a larger share of the market as long as most consumers are unwilling to pay a premium for organic products with all their cost increasing sustainable attributes over products that have only a single sustainable attribute, in our case enhanced animal welfare.

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Grocery stores are important settings to promote healthier food and beverage choices. The present paper aims at reviewing the effectiveness of different types of in-store interventions and how they impact sales of different product category in real grocery stores. Systematic search was conducted in six databases. In-store interventions were categorized according to the framework by Kraak et al. (2017) into one or more of eight interventions (e.g., place, profile, portion, pricing, promotion, healthy default picks, prompting and proximity). This systematic theme-based review follows the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) data screening and selection. Thirty-six studies were included in the qualitative synthesis and 30 studies were included in the meta-analysis, representing 72 combinations of in-store interventions. The analysis demonstrates that interventions overall had small significant effect size (ES) using Cohen’s d on food purchase behavior (d = 0.17, 95% CI [0.04, 0.09]), with largest ES for pricing (d = 0.21) and targeting fruits and vegetables (d = 0.28). Analysis of ES of in-store interventions show that pricing, and pricing combined with promotion and prompting, effectively impacted purchase behavior. Interventions significantly impacted both sales of healthy and unhealthy products and significantly increased sales of fruits and vegetables, healthy beverage and total volume of healthy products. Results should however be interpreted with some caution, given the relatively low quality of overall evidence and low number of studies and observations for some types of intervention. Further research exploring impact on different in-store interventions and targeting especially unhealthy products are needed.