All you have to do is ask: A nudge strategy for reducing sweetness in beverages

Abstract

This study investigates how a mandated choice approach can help reduce sugar intake in café beverages. It addresses two key questions: (1) Can providing customers the option to choose how sweet their drinks are through a mandated choice approach encourage them to select less sweet options? (2) Does adding calorie information, alongside the mandated choice approach, have a stronger impact on customers' decisions about the sweetness of their drinks? Through a real-world experiment, the study discovered that customers who were prompted to select their drink's sweetness level tended to choose drinks with less sugar. However, providing calorie information did not significantly enhance the effect of the mandated choice. This research highlights that a simple change such as adopting a mandated choice can reduce sugar consumption while maintaining customer satisfaction.