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Category: Project

Description: The settings in which people make food choices (incl. food delivery platforms) make it increasingly difficult for people to select healthy food options and not exceed their recommended calorie intake. This could be one of the contributing factors for more than half of adults in the UK are overweight and obese. The current project aims to test the impact of positioning interventions (i.e. tweaking the order in which restaurants or food options are presented to users) designed to promote the selection of food options with fewer calories using ‘Take A BITe’, a simulated food delivery platform developed by The Behavioural Insights Team that can be adapted to run behavioural experiments. The study sample will be a nationally representative sample of UK adults who have previously used food delivery platforms. They will be randomly allocated to see either a control version of the simulated delivery platform in which the restaurants and the foods within each category (i.e. starters, mains, desserts, and drinks) of food menus are positioned in random order or a version of the simulated delivery platform featuring one of the following interventions: (1) repositioning foods, (2) repositioning restaurants, (3) combined intervention of (1) and (2), and (4) combined intervention based on kcal-price index. The study will estimate the effectiveness of interventions on the number of calories purchased as part of a food order on a simulated food delivery platform when compared to the control condition but also to each other. The study will also investigate the difference in the average calorie content of ‘mains’ on the selected restaurant’s menu and the average calorie content of standardised servings of the selected items when comparing those exposed to the interventions and those in the control group. The study will also explore differences in outcomes in terms of participants’ sex, SES, BMI, and frequency of platform use. Acknowledgements: This study is led by The Behavioural Insights Team and delivered in collaboration with Nesta and Oxford University. This work is supported by Nesta.