Nudges for more sustainable food choices in the out-of-home catering sector applied in real-world labs

Langen, Nina; Ohlhausen, Pascal; Steinmeier, Fara; Friedrich, Silke; Engelmann, Tobias; Speck, Melanie; Damerau, Kerstin; Bienge, Katrin; Rohn, Holger; Teitscheid, Petra

doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2022.106167

Cited by 20 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…While in the past, vegetarian options were mainly created by omitting the meat component and were therefore primarily composed of side dishes, today there are a number of more modern ways of revising recipes and menus. The dynamic cooperation with public caterers within the NAHGAST project 1 (Langen et al 2022 ) has resulted in different approaches to revise their own food offerings at different levels of implementation. Table 1 summarizes the most relevant revisions from an environmental perspective.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How public catering accelerates sustainability: a German case study

Speck

Wagner²,

Buchborn

et al. 2022

Sustain Sci

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Public catering has become increasingly important in recent years. With increasing annual customers, the sector’s impact on the environment is also growing continuously. At the same time, public catering offers a lever to promote sustainable nutrition that has rarely been used so far. Small changes in kitchen practices and food offers can thus be multiplied into a significant positive impact on environmental challenges, such as climate change or loss of biodiversity due to the large number of servings. In contrast to private households, management decisions in public catering can influence the food-related environmental impact of thousands of customers. This article deals with the nationwide level of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and resource use in the German public catering segment “business” and its saving potentials by different scenarios of unsupported and supported recipe revision. In this paper, we define "unsupported" as the intuitive optimization of recipes by employees of public catering businesses. In contrast, “supported” approaches had to meet specific target goals, for example of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung; engl. German Nutrition Society or the sustainable level. Specifically, we will test how (A) an unsupported recipe revision, (B) a recipe revision based on dietary recommendations and (C) a recipe revision using scientific guidance affect the environmental impact of a dish. As a methodological framework, an online survey of public catering companies was conducted as well as a scenario analysis at menu level and at nationwide level. The results are based on empirical data on the one hand, and on extrapolations on the other. The results show that the nationwide implementation of recipe revision according to scientific guidance—such as concrete target goals for the GHG emissions per serving—can save up to 44% of resource use in the German business catering sector (which corresponds to 3.4 million tons of resources per year) and as much as 40% of GHG emissions (0.6 tons GHG emissions per year). Even in the scenario of unsupported recipe revision, GHG and resource savings of up to 20% can be realized. The results show that public catering can reduce its material and carbon footprint by 20% overnight. Moreover, the findings show indications for the sustainable transformation of public catering. Nevertheless, it must be noted that these are some first steps of the transformation, which will require further changes with even greater impacts and political activities.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How public catering accelerates sustainability: a German case study

Speck

Wagner²,

Buchborn

et al. 2022

Sustain Sci

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…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…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Nonetheless, evidence indicates that putting the most sustainable item at the top of a hard-copy menu is associated with an increase in sustainable food consumption in workplace canteens, hospitals, and educational settings (Langen et al, 2022).…”

Section: Introduction 11 Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Shi¹,

Ratajczak²,

Thornton³

et al. 2023

Appetite

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“…Frequency of choices by product position. 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 ( 2019) used a pre-post design in actual kiosks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast to healthy eating, there is a research gap on the effect of ordering food products by their environmental impact on consumer choices when shopping online. Nonetheless, evidence indicates that putting the most sustainable item at the top of a hard-copy menu is associated with an increase in sustainable food consumption in workplace canteens, hospitals, and educational settings (Langen et al, 2022). Consequently, it is of interest to investigate whether using product ordering can increase the choices of sustainable products in an online supermarket environment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Shi¹,

Ratajczak²,

Thornton³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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The production, transportation, storage, and waste of food products have a significant impact on the environment. We investigated whether displaying products in ascending order of their carbon footprint in an online supermarket environment can shift consumer choices towards more sustainable options. We also examined whether the effect of the ordering intervention differs when the ordering is overt, where information about the ordering is explicit, compared to when it is covert and participants are not told about the ordering. We conducted a three-arm parallel-group randomised trial using 1842 online panel participants from England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, who had previously shopped online. Participants shopped for a meal for two, choosing one product from each of six product categories in a simulated online supermarket environment. Six products were shown in a vertical list on each product category page. Products were randomly ordered for the control arm, whereas the products were ordered by carbon footprint in the covert and overt ordering arms. In the overt ordering arm, a statement was displayed in a box at the top of each product page about the ordering of the products. The primary outcome was whether one of the three most sustainable products was chosen in each product category. There was no effect of the covert ordering intervention on the probability of choosing more sustainable products compared with the control arm (OR = 0.97, 95% CI 0.88-1.07, p = 0.533). Furthermore, we could not reject the hypothesis that the effects of the covert ordering intervention and overt ordering intervention do not differ (p = 0.594). Analysis of the control condition showed that the positioning of products had no effect on choices, which may explain why re-ordering products also had no effect. In the overt condition, only 19.5% of people correctly answered that the products were ordered according to sustainability in a follow-up question, suggesting that they didn’t notice the statement.

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Nudges for more sustainable food choices in the out-of-home catering sector applied in real-world labs

Cited by 20 publications

References 53 publications

How public catering accelerates sustainability: a German case study

How public catering accelerates sustainability: a German case study

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

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

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