Have you ever set yourself a healthy-eating goal for the week? To only eat fruit for breakfast? Or to lose a couple of pounds? Only to find that a few days later, you are already tucking in to your favourite pastry on the way to work and breaking all the rules that you set for yourself?
Well, it’s not just you.
Why is it so hard for us to change our eating habits and turn “healthy eating” thinking into actual behaviours? Especially when we know that healthy foods can help boost our physical health and mental wellbeing?
The answer lies in where we get our food.
If we look at the places where we buy our food (cafés, restaurants, takeaways) we see menus that include unhealthy foods containing high sugars, fats, and salts. Posters promoting fast food line the walls of shops grabbing our attention, feeding our appetites. Combine this offering with the fact that we are often tired, stressed, and hungry when ordering food, and you can see why we constantly seek unhealthy food for its fast fixes.
So, the way that food is often presented to us, makes it very easy for us to choose the unhealthier options.
But what if there was a way to change this? And present food in a way that makes the healthier options more appealing and easier to choose…
We did just that.
What did we do?
By simply redesigning the layout and look of a menu, we changed which foods customers spent their time focusing on and what they chose to order. But not hamburgers, chips, or ice cream sundaes. Our designs nudged customers towards a healthier alternative – jacket potatoes.
Where did we do it?
Livewell South West (a non-profit organisation) reached out to us to run a nudge project at a local café – Porkies Café (Plymouth). Porkies was an ideal candidate café for the project, being a regular stop for the surrounding community and a host for many local events in the neighbourhood.
The Nudges
We created four different nudges that went into Porkies Café to try and influence customers food choice. Each nudge was created around three principles:
- Make it stand out – Make the healthier foods (jacket potatoes) eye-catching with salient colours and images.
- Make it upmarket – People are more likely to purchase something if they perceive it to have higher quality. We increased perceived quality by changing the way the price was presented (removing the “£” sign from the menus) and adjusting the overall feel of the café’s brand.
- Make it appetising – People are more likely to choose a food item if they know that it’s going to be tasty and enjoyable to eat. By utilising descriptive words such as “succulent”, “fluffy”, and scrumptious”, we enhanced the perceived taste of the foods.
Using the design principles above we designed:
- New table menus
- A new blackboard menu
- Posters
- Point-of-sales material
The four nudges used in Porkies Cafe
We compared the sales of jacket potatoes before-and-after we added our nudges.
What did we find?
In the month before we ‘nudgified’ the café, 12 jacket potatoes were sold. But in the following month when the nudges were in place, the café sold 27 jacket potatoes– that’s a 125% increase!
Not only did the nudges increase the sales of potatoes, but they also increased the variety of jacket potatoes that were chosen. Before the nudges, the only jacket potatoes that were sold were cheese or cheese and beans. But after nudging, customers were selecting more varieties like the tuna and chicken options.
The café’s owner was impressed to find that two customers had even changed from their "usual" (English breakfasts) to the jacket potatoes as a result of the new design of the café:
"they saw the jacket potatoes on the new menu and thought it looked nice...once they tried it they loved it and have stuck with it"
She also said that customers had started to “ask more questions” about the food items.
A great result overall!
The impact
Reducing obesity
Nudges are simple and effective. You can see from this project that simply changing the look and feel of a place can completely change a person's "usual" food choices . And in a positive way!.
The powerful potential of nudges, makes them a major intervention in the campaign to tackle obesity, which now affects 26% of adults. This project has already shown a substantial impact on the eating habits of Porkies Café’s local community.
Reducing costs
Looking at the bigger picture of health, by increasing healthy eating and reducing obesity rates, implementing nudges can help to reduce the £5.1 billion burden on health services for treating obesity-caused illnesses. Nudges themselves are a cost-effective solution when compared to many traditional approaches that encourage healthy-eating.
Creating incentives
Just a few changes to the design of a café, resulted in extra turnover through the increased sales of jacket potatoes. By targeting healthy food items with high mark-up (e.g., jacket potatoes), we were able to promote healthier eating for customers while also generating a sizeable financial incentive for the café. The cost- and time-effectiveness of these nudge interventions is hugely advantageous for all businesses (small, medium, and large).
By extending this project to more food businesses, we are looking to have an important impact on local (and eventually national) community health by encouraging small changes in every day eating.
