Orders of Healthier Adult Menu Items in a Full-Service Restaurant Chain with a Healthier Children’s Menu

Abstract

This study evaluated orders of adult menu items designated as healthier at the Silver Diner, a regional full-service restaurant chain serving over 4 million customers annually. This restaurant implemented a healthier children’s menu in April 2012. Orders of adult menu items were abstracted from before (September 2011–March 2012; PRE; n = 1,801,647) and after (September 2012–March 2013; POST; n = 1,793,582) the healthier children’s menu was introduced. Entrées, appetizers, and sides listed as healthier options on the menu were coded as healthier. PRE to POST changes in the percentage of orders of healthier items, soda, and dessert were evaluated using McNemar tests of paired proportions. Orders of healthier entrées, appetizers, and sides on the adult menu increased PRE to POST (8.9% to 10.4%, 25.5% to 27.5%, and 7.3% to 9.3%, respectively), and soda and dessert orders decreased (23.2% to 21.7% and 29.0% to 28.3%, respectively). All shifts were statistically significant (p < 0.0001). Our findings demonstrate improvements in orders of healthier adult menu options during the same time frame as a healthy children’s menu change. Future research can help elucidate mechanisms to inform future health promotion efforts in restaurants in ways that have the potential to impact both adults and children.

Evaluating Mediterranean Diet-Adherent, Healthy and Allergen-Free Meals Offered in Tarragona Province Restaurants (Catalonia, Spain): A Cross-Sectional Study

“…However, as suggested by previous studies, regarding the offering of half portions or smaller serving sizes of adult dishes to children, restaurants should include healthier options to accustom children to selecting and consuming healthy meals [73,74]. Similarly, as reported by Mueller et al, the improvement of healthy child menus seems to encourage the selection of healthier meals by adults [75].…”

Testing the impact of overt and covert ordering interventions on sustainable consumption choices: A randomised controlled trial

“…Our study was powered to detect a 5% difference, which is the magnitude of the difference found by Koutoukidis et al (2019). Our study does differ from many of the few existing studies, which were based on behaviour in bricks-and-mortar environment using hard-copy menus when healthier items were placed at the top of lists (Dayan & Bar-Hillel, 2011;Mueller et al, 2020), including the one that ordered products by environmental impact (Langen et al, 2022). There are also differences in study design, for example we used a randomised controlled trial, whereas Schmidtke et al…”

“…One type of intervention that has been effective at promoting healthy consumption in physical food-purchasing environments is altering the positioning of items: a metaanalysis of 15 comparisons from 12 studies found that when food was placed further away there was a moderate reduction in its consumption (Standardized Mean Difference −0.60, 95% CI −0.84 to −0.36) (Hollands et al, 2019). In addition, evidence was found for an order effect regarding the positioning of options on physical menus: when healthier items were placed at the top of lists, they were more likely to be chosen (Dayan & Bar-Hillel, 2011;Mueller et al, 2020).…”

Do Chefs Value Health in Their Olive Oil Purchasing Decisions?

“…Thirdly, restaurants that seek to stand out from the crowd can find “healthy eating” as an effective strategy for market positioning and differentiation, given that consumers value health above all else in their food choices. Indeed, previous studies have demonstrated that health claims drive greater consumption of healthy foods [ 27 , 51 , 52 , 53 ].…”