Abstract
Sustainable meal choices in the out-of-home catering market are essential to attaining the Sustainable Development Goals. This study investigated consumers’ acceptance of different features that help service providers to work more sustainably. For this purpose, data of a choice experiment and a supporting online questionnaire were analyzed using latent class analysis (LCA) and the data of n = 373 employees. Examined attributes in the choice experiment were menu variety, menu type, ordering system, ingredients and price. LCA led to four consumer segments: variety seekers (27.6%), spontaneous decisionmakers—vegetarian (25.7%), spontaneous decisionmakers—meat (24.1%) and vegetarians/vegans (22.6%). Results showed that consumers in all four segments expected to have the choice between different menus in company canteens. Moreover, they preferred spontaneous choice to preordering. Both preferences hamper sustainable production and consumption in the catering sector.
Highlights
The out-of-home catering market is the second biggest food branch in Germany, with12.4 billion guests per year in 2019
The household income was fairly evenly distributed between canteen users and potential guests, except for the lowest income category, with a peak between 3600–5000€ in the group of canteen users (A: 32.3%)
Two of these aspects were directly related to meals while the other two aspects were related to the service
Summary
The out-of-home catering market is the second biggest food branch in Germany, with. 12.4 billion guests per year in 2019. Each guest uses these services more than 140 times a year [1,2]. The out-of-home catering market consists of four major segments: hotel and restaurant catering, fast-food catering, event catering and company catering. In 2019, German employees spent 7.4 billion euros on their meals at work. The sector of company catering reported growth rates of about 2 to 3% per year [1,2,3].
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