Review: Do green defaults reduce meat consumption?

Meier, Johanna; Andor, Mark; Doebbe, Friederike C.; Haddaway, Neal R.; Reisch, Lucia A.

doi:10.1016/j.foodpol.2022.102298

Cited by 26 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…In relation to sustainable food, the application of default nudges has been limited and restricted to vegetarian options or plant-based alternatives to meat (Meier et al, 2022). To date, no study experimented with plant-based defaults to reduce dairy milk consumption, although the dairy industry alone accounts for 2.2% of global GHG emissions and plant-based milk alternatives fare up to 30 times better on all major environmental parameters (Poore & Nemecek, 2018).…”

Section: Literature Review 21 Immediate and Persistent Effects Of Sus...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The initial field evidence on meat-free defaults is very promising yet highly variable, as highlighted in a recent review by Meier et al (2022). In a 3-week randomised controlled experiment in a Swedish restaurant, customers who were randomly presented with a menu having vegetarian and fish options available by default, and meat options "available on request", ordered 24% less meat compared to customers presented with a menu including meat and fish by default, and vegetarian options "on request" (Gravert & Kurz, 2021).…”

Section: Literature Review 21 Immediate and Persistent Effects Of Sus...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The current literature on sustainable food default offers little insights into the persistence of the effect when people encounter the default more than once (and can therefore use their experience to guide future choices) (Meier et al, 2022). The only limited evidence comes from Gravert & Kurz (2021), in which the default was implemented over multiple consecutive weeks and the restaurant had ≈ 20% of regular customers who visited at least once a week.…”

Section: Literature Review 21 Immediate and Persistent Effects Of Sus...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Considering the overall large effect of defaults (Jachimowicz et al, 2019), and more specifically of meatfree defaults on reducing meat consumption (Meier et al, 2022), we hypothesised that:…”

Section: Dependent Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While default nudges have been extensively applied, several questions remain open (discussed in detail in section 2). In particular: defaults have been explored only marginally with sustainable food (despite highly promising effects) and not at all with plant-based milk alternatives (Meier et al, 2022); relatively little is known about the persistence of default effects with repeated decisions (Van Rookhuijzen et al, 2021), and even less about the extent to which situational or personal factors, such as the strength of relative preferences, influence the effectiveness of default nudges (Jachimowicz et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Dairy milk is available on request”: oat milk default halves dairy milk choices in cafés. 2 natural field and 1 online experiment.

Fabris¹

2023

Preprint

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Diets in high-income countries need to shift from animal to plant-centric to meet climate change targets, improve human health, and reduce animal suffering. Hard regulation via bans and taxes, however, is politically difficult. Initial evidence found that setting more sustainable food options as the default option in out-of-home settings can be an effective yet liberty-preserving approach to reducing the consumption of animal products. We conducted 2 natural field experiments in the cafés of 2 universities in London over respectively 2 and 7 weeks to test whether reversing the default milk option from dairy to oat would significantly decrease dairy milk choices for milk-based barista drinks. Using data on 68,792 milk choices from 5 cafés, we estimated with a difference in difference technique that setting oat milk as the default milk option persistently decreased the percentage of dairy milk choices by respectively 23 and 55 points, with a symmetrical increase in oat milk choices. In the longer experiment, the intervention was not associated with any decrease in overall sales. In an online-based replication of the field experiments with university students (n = 212), we found that the effect was concentrated only in participants with weak relative preferences between dairy and oat milk. Additionally, we observed that over 75% of students would approve if university cafés switched their default milk option to oat milk. These results provide strong evidence that serving oat milk by default is an effective, low-cost, and viable strategy to reduce dairy milk consumption at scale.

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Section: Literature Review 21 Immediate and Persistent Effects Of Sus...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Review 21 Immediate and Persistent Effects Of Sus...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Review 21 Immediate and Persistent Effects Of Sus...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Dependent Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

“Dairy milk is available on request”: oat milk default halves dairy milk choices in cafés. 2 natural field and 1 online experiment.

Fabris¹

2023

Preprint

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Swedish farmers' approval of nudges

Colen,

Englberger,

Rommel

2024

Agribusiness

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Interest in the use of behavioral policy approaches, such as nudges, has strongly increased over the past years, including in the domains of food, agricultural and environmental policies. While the approval of nudges among the general public has been studied extensively, we know little about the attitude of farmers toward nudging. Farmers may (perceive to) be affected directly by food and agriculture nudges, which may result in different approval as compared to citizens. Moreover, given the increased interest in the use of nudges targeting farm behavior, it is relevant to know their attitude toward these policies. In an online survey, 342 Swedish farmers indicated their approval or disapproval of the same nudging policies that have been investigated in earlier studies with citizens. We find that, overall and over all areas covered, farmers have remarkably lower approval rates of nudging policies than the general public. While this may be partially explained by their socioeconomic profiles, also the connection of some nudges with farming activities may explain their different opinion. We find that farmers with a “green” orientation are generally more favorable, especially so for “green” nudges. [EconLit Citations: Q18, D03].

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Green Nudging: A Behavioral Approach to Environmental Policies

Bonini,

Dorigoni

2024

World Sustainability Series

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Review: Do green defaults reduce meat consumption?

Cited by 26 publications

References 63 publications

“Dairy milk is available on request”: oat milk default halves dairy milk choices in cafés. 2 natural field and 1 online experiment.

“Dairy milk is available on request”: oat milk default halves dairy milk choices in cafés. 2 natural field and 1 online experiment.

Swedish farmers' approval of nudges

Green Nudging: A Behavioral Approach to Environmental Policies

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