This New Playbook Shares 'No-Regret' Ways Your Restaurant Can Support Better Food Choices

In 2020, World Resources Institute published their fantastic ‘Playbook For Guiding Diners Towards Plant-Rich Foods’. This highlighted that decision-making around food is not driven by logic or rational thinking, but is instead influenced by a wide variety of factors in the food environment in question – meaning that restaurants have the opportunity to guide consumer choices. Known as ‘nudges’, these psychological influences often work on a subconscious level and don’t need to be explicit to have an effect. Examples include the descriptive language used on menus and the placement, size and pricing of the food or drink in question.

Consumers increasingly want food that is both healthy and sustainable – but they also say they need help making these choices.  According to a 2024 Sodexo survey, 72% of American respondents feel eating more sustainably is an urgent need.

With great power comes great responsibility. If we are to build better food systems for our future, it’s critical that the hospitality industry leverages its unique influence to guide diners towards foods that are better for their personal health as well as that of the planet. This is reflected in two of the 10 focus areas of the Food Made Good Framework: ‘More Plants, Better Meat’ and ‘Feed People Well’.

This week, WRI released a much-anticipated updated version of the Playbook, a new piece of research that builds on the 2020 edition and now includes industry experience and insights from nearly 350 academic trials. 

Here, we look at the new edition and explore some of the ways in which your restaurant can gently ‘nudge’ customers towards healthy and sustainable choices.

What is nudge theory?

Nudge theory has its roots in psychology; this is not surprising, considering that it’s all about subtly influencing consumer behaviour! The concept was named in a 2008 book ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness’ by Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor, and Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago economist. The book posited that small, simple and subtle interventions can be a powerful lever for creating behavioural change.

The 2024 WRI Playbook 

The 2024 ‘The Food Service Playbook for Promoting Sustainable Food Choices’ gives foodservice operators the very latest strategies that empower consumers to make more sustainable food choices. Recognising that the most powerful dietary action that any individual can take is to reduce their meat consumption, the Playbook – like its predecessor – is focused on increasing the availability, visibility and appeal of plant-rich dishes.

The Playbook outlines a ‘6P framework for change’, with 90 simple interventions organised under six headings – price, promotion, presentation, placement, people and product – with case studies and testimonials from food industry experts to illustrate how these can be applied in practice.

• Price: Modifying the cost 
• Promotion: Marketing and communications around the food offering
• Presentation: Menu design, including language
• Placement: Changing the physical food environment
• People: Getting staff members engaged
• Product: Modifying the food on offer

This edition includes a summary of new academic research published between 2018 and 2023, as well as an original analysis of the research evidence. This analysis helped WRI to identify the top priority behaviour change techniques ideal for rapid adoption by the foodservice industry, based on “a combination of expert stakeholder ratings and scores that reflect the relative number of times that each technique led to a significant shift in food-related intentions or choices versus no significant change.” 

Each of these techniques was selected for being supported by the majority of research trials and for being considered feasible to implement in practice by people in the industry.

There are 18 of these ‘no-regret’ interventions identified in the Playbook, including:

• Removing unappealing language describing plant-rich foods from menus. Unappealing terms include those that frame these choices as restrictive in some way, including ‘vegetarian’, ‘vegan’ and ‘meat-free’.
• Using indulgent language to describe these dishes, focusing on their provenance or sensory attributes
• Adding plant-rich ingredients to meals to reduce their overall meat content per portion (for example, using mushrooms to bulk out the minced meat in burgers, meatballs, ragùs, etc.)
• Increasing both the proportion and the variety of the plant-rich dishes you have on offer.
• Integrating plant-based meat alternatives amongst meat-containing foods in buffets or other displays.
• Providing your chefs and other staff involved in food preparation with the training needed to ensure that plant-based dishes are as creative, interesting, delicious and visually appealing as possible.
• Using your marketing and communications channels to promote the environmental, local and taste/flavour benefits of choosing more plant-rich foods.

You can download the 2024 Playbook here. Coolfood (WRI's initiative to curb diet-related emissions by 25% by 2030) have also created a ‘Quick Start Guide for Food Service’ – a distilled, actionable version of the research designed to help restaurants and other F&B businesses to put theory into action and begin implementing these techniques as quickly as possible. You can find the Quick Start Guide here.

Interested in learning more about how your business can encourage healthier choices? Find 11 simple steps you can take here!

You can also read about the overlap between healthy diets and sustainable ones here or take a deeper dive into the power of language on menus here.