Abstract
This paper uses the frameworks and evidence from marketing and behavioral economics to highlight the opportunities and barriers for portion control in food service environments. Applying Kahneman's ‘thinking fast and slow' concepts, it describes 10 strategies that can be effective in ‘tricking' the consumer's fast cognitive system to make better decisions and in triggering the slow cognitive system to help prevent the fast system from making bad decisions. These strategies include shrinking defaults, elongating packages, increasing the visibility of small portions, offering more mixed virtue options, adding more small sizes, offering ‘right-sized' standard portions, using meaningful size labels, adopting linear pricing, using temporal landmarks to push smaller portions and facilitating pre-commitment. For each of these strategies, I discuss the specific cost and revenue barriers that a food service operator would face if the strategy were adopted.
Highlights
Around the world, but especially in America, consumers are eating more energy in meals away from the home than in the past years
Behavioral economics, in contrast to classical economics, offers a systematic way in which to think about apparent irrationalities in consumer decision making
The behavioral economics framework offers some strategies, described in the section 'Portion reduction opportunities', that may be effective in ‘tricking’ the fast system to make better decisions and in triggering the slow system to help prevent the fast system from making bad decisions
Summary
Opportunities and barriers for smaller portions in food service: lessons from marketing and behavioral economics. Applying Kahneman’s ‘thinking fast and slow’ concepts, it describes 10 strategies that can be effective in ‘tricking’ the consumer’s fast cognitive system to make better decisions and in triggering the slow cognitive system to help prevent the fast system from making bad decisions These strategies include shrinking defaults, elongating packages, increasing the visibility of small portions, offering more mixed virtue options, adding more small sizes, offering ‘rightsized’ standard portions, using meaningful size labels, adopting linear pricing, using temporal landmarks to push smaller portions and facilitating pre-commitment. Restaurant meals have become larger, and we eat more of them.[1,2] With increased energy consumption closely associated with the rise in obesity,[3] many authors have suggested portion control as an important means to reduce the trend.[4] In the current paper, I will use frameworks and evidence from marketing and behavioral economics to highlight the opportunities and barriers for portion control in food service environments. The opportunities and barriers will be considered from the perspective of both the customer and the food service operator
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