Adjusting menu choices to improve nutrition and reduce environmental impact

A significant proportion of the food we eat in the UK is consumed outside the home. For example, 42 per cent of workers eat at a canteen and seven million children eat school lunches every day. This means that eating outside the home accounts for a significant proportion of the impact diet has on our health and the environment.

A worker usually eats one meal a day in a canteen serving menu options that rotate on a fixed-term basis. For example, menu options A, B, and C are available on Monday, options D, E, and F on Tuesday, and so on. This means that the long-term nutritional and environmental performance of a canteen or other place serving food in this way depends on which menu options are served on the same day.

Project aims

We wanted to find out if we could improve people’s diet and reduce the carbon footprint of food consumed in a canteen, simply by rearranging the options on the weekly set menu.

During this project we are trialling a tool that:

• generates a reduction in both the carbon footprint of meals and their sugar, fat, and salt content
• can be implemented without compromising food acceptability and without consumers even being aware that changes have been made
• will be ready for immediate application at a city-wide level and beyond

Our work so far

We worked with the University of Bristol’s Catering Department to reorganise the weekly menu at a catered halls of residence, swapping meals across the week to change the ‘competition’ between dishes served each day.

We rotated two weekly menus, comprising three different evening meal choices each weekday. Our optimised menu featured the same 15 dishes as the original, just reorganised on different days to boost uptake of the more sustainable, healthier options.

Since diners could only choose one evening meal per day, we found it was best to cluster the meals with a high carbon footprint and saturated fat content, such as lasagne and chicken Kiev, on the same day, so these more popular options competed against each other. That meant greener options – like lentil chilli and cauliflower curry – were more likely to be chosen across the week.

One of the weekly menus was shown to reduce the overall carbon footprint by 31.4% and saturated fat intake by 11.3%, for roughly 300 diners. The other lowered the overall carbon footprint by 30% and saturated fat intake by 1.4%.

Findings indicated diner satisfaction levels were largely unaffected by the change.

What we hope to achieve

We hope this work will support the development of Consumer Lab – a University of Bristol facility that lets us monitor food selections in the real world while adjusting menu offerings on any given day.

If the project is successful, we hope to partner with Bristol City Council and Bristol Food Network to explore options for rolling out our approach to schools across Bristol.