Nudging green food: The effects of a hedonic cue, menu position, a warm‐glow cue, and a descriptive norm

Abstract

Meat consumption is associated with both public health risks and substantial CO 2 emissions. In a large-scale field-experiment, we applied four nudges to the digital menus in 136 hamburger restaurants. The nudges promoted vegetarian food purchases by either (1) changing the menu position of vegetarian food, or aligning vegetarian food with (2) a hedonic, taste-focused nudge, (3) the warm-glow effect, or (4) a descriptive social norm. These nudges were thus aimed to shift salience toward a certain goal or the salience of a specific alternative. Vegetarian food purchases were measured in two datasets analyzing if nudges affected customers' "route" to ordering vegetarian food (29,640 observations), and the total number of vegetarian food sold during the intervention (346,081 observations). Results showed that the position nudge affected customers route to buying vegetarian food. More specifically, making the "green category" more accessible made more customers order through that category. Interestingly, this did not affect the total number of vegetarian sales. However, results indicate that nudges that utilize the salience of goals, in particular hedonic goals, may have an overall positive effect on total vegetarian sales.

Testing the effect of descriptive dynamic social norm messages on meatless food purchases in Aotearoa New Zealand and UK university food outlets

“…Specifically, descriptive dynamic messages may hold more promise for reducing meat intake for three main reasons. First, the messages explicitly specify the behaviour required (reducing meat intake), contrasting previous usage of descriptive messages to influence meat consumption (e.g., Alblas et al, 2022;Reinholdsson et al, 2022). Second, the social norm message aligns with previous studies that supported the effects of descriptive messages to increase healthy food choices (e.g., Payne et al, 2015;Thomas et al, 2017).…”

“…Findings showed that regardless of condition (e.g., descriptive social norm or control), high meat consumers reduced meat intake, while low meat consumers increased meat intake over two weeks. While this study was limited by self-report dietary measures which are prone to inaccuracies (Heitmann and Lissner, 1995), a further study in Swedish fast-food outlets which displayed a descriptive social norm message and measured the number of 'green' or vegetarian sales, also reported no effects on intake (Reinholdsson et al, 2022). However, a key limitation in both these studies was that the descriptive social norm message presented did not explicitly refer to reduced meat intake.…”

“…Indeed, several studies have also reported no effects of a social norm message to reduce meat intake (Sparkman et al, 2020, study 4;Çoker et al, 2022;Reinholdsson et al, 2022). However, several other studies reported that exposure to a dynamic social norm message reduced meat purchases (Sparkman and Walton, 2017;Sparkman et al, 2020, studies 1 and 2).…”

Increasing the Consumption of Environmentally Friendly Foods in a University Dining Hall Using Menu Item Placement

“…In addition, a large-scale field study evaluated the effect of four different nudging strategies (i.e., normative goal, hedonic goal, a combination of normative and hedonic influence, and menu placement) to promote the purchase of green foods category (i.e., vegetarian and vegan options) in fast-food restaurants. Placement of the green category at the top of the menu led to a significant increase in the number of vegetarian and vegan dishes chosen [ 47 ]. As confirmation of this, among the implicit techniques applicable to the food choice environment, menu re-ordering was found to be the most effective in guiding diners’ decision making towards low-environmental impact dietary selections [ 35 ].…”

The Food Service Playbook for Promoting Sustainable Food Choices

“…The results of the study showed that the taste message was most effective, leading to a significant 10 percent increase in plant-rich food sales compared to when no message was present. If scaled across all MAX Burger outlets, researchers estimated that this minor change to wording would translate to around 140,000 extra sales of green menu options over the course of a year (Reinholdsson et al 2023). Since this time, MAX Burger has continued to expand its range of tasty plant-rich options and ensure that these are framed as positive choices in its "Supreme Green" menu.…”