Abstract
Objective: Each day, tens of millions of restaurant goers, conference attendees, college students, military personnel, and school children serve themselves at buffets – many being all-you-can-eat buffets. Knowing how the food order at a buffet triggers what a person selects could be useful in guiding diners to make healthier selections. Method: The breakfast food selections of 124 health conference attendees were tallied at two separate seven-item buffet lines (which included cheesy eggs, potatoes, bacon, cinnamon rolls, low-fat granola, low-fat yogurt, and fruit). The food order between the two lines was reversed (least healthy to most healthy, and vise-versa). Participants were randomly assigned to choose their meal from one line or the other, and researchers recorded what participants selected. Results: With buffet foods, the first ones seen are the ones most selected. Over 75% of diners selected the first food they saw, and the first three foods a person encountered in the buffet comprised 66% of all the foods they took. Serving the less healthy foods first led diners to take 31% more total food items (p Conclusions: Three words summarize these results: First foods most. What ends up on a buffet diner’s plate is dramatically determined by the presentation order of food. Rearranging food order from healthiest to least healthy can nudge unknowing or even resistant diners toward a healthier meal, helping make them slim by design. Health-conscious diners, can proactively start at the healthier end of the line, and this same basic principle of “first foods most” may be relevant in other contexts – such as when serving or passing food at family dinners.
Highlights
Each day millions of people pick up a plate at the beginning of a buffet line
Many of these people will not even directly pay for the food they take because they are not at a buffet restaurant. They are conference goers lining up at a lunch buffet, travelers eating a complimentary hotel breakfast, college students on a meal plan, military personnel eating on base, or one of the 31 million K12 graders eating a USDA-reimbursable school lunch
To examine how the food order in buffet lines can influence food choice, we observed the foods that conference attendees served themselves from a full breakfast buffet line
Summary
Each day millions of people pick up a plate at the beginning of a buffet line Many of these people will not even directly pay for the food they take because they are not at a buffet restaurant. Given the growing prevalence of obesity ([1], [2], [3]), a number of recent studies have examined how to redesign cafeterias and buffets to guide or nudge diners to eat less and eat better Many of these studies have utilized principles from behavioral economics and have generally focused on at least one aspect of the CANmethod – making the healthier foods more Convenient, Attractive, or Normative ([4], [5]). Healthy foods can be made more normative by making them – or a reduced portion size – appear more normal, common, or cool ([11])
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