Taste Adventures Blog

Behaviour change tip 1/3 How to increase sales of the healthier options in your grab and go lunch bar – prime location

You want to increase sales of the healthier options in your grab and go lunch bar, but what’s the best way to do it?

Tip 1 of 3: Position healthier choices in the prime location

The nature of a grab and go lunch counter means your customers are after a quick convenient option, and are likely in a hurry. This means they are influenced by what stands out and catches their attention first. Big brands don’t pay for prime location on shop shelves for nothing – they know it works. Items positioned in the middle of a shelf and at eye level are selected nearly 300% more than when placed on the left, as shown in a study by Keller in 2015.

Thorndike and colleagues conducted a study in a hospital cafeteria in the USA where items were labelled green (healthy); yellow (less healthy); or red (unhealthy) and, importantly, they also rearranged the offer to make healthy items more accessible. With just these simple changes they found that sales of less healthy items dropped by 17% and green healthier food sales increased by 11% which was sustained even two years later.

So make sure you place the healthier options in the middle of the display customers tend to browse first, and not in the bottom corner of the display, or tucked away in a separate healthy section around the corner. Although Thorndike’s study might suggest that you should use traffic light labelling to highlight your healthier options, don’t forget that many of us aren’t motivated by health so take a look at our next top tip to see what else you could do.

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Find out even more tips in our new book, Healthy Profits, including how you can reinvigorate your food offer, use rewards and meal deals and LOTS more!! Plus, by buying our book you’ll get exclusive access to useful resources like our Healthy Profits checklist, case studies, action plan templates to name just a few! Get our book here!

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Thanks so much to everyone who has helped us along the way and made Healthy Profits a reality. We couldn’t have done it without you!

References:

Keller, C., Markert, F. and Bucher, T., (2015). Nudging product choices: The effect of position change on snack bar choice. Food and Quality Preference, 41, pp. 41-43.

Thorndike, A.N., Riss, J., Sonnenberg, L.M., and Levy, D.E. (2014). Traffic-Light Labels and Choice Architecture: Promoting Healthy Food Choices. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 46(2), pp. 143-149.

Why traditional approaches to getting us to eat well and move more have little effect

So, we all know we should eat well and exercise in order to be healthy – so why don’t we do it? The majority of us are gaining weight, eating too many foods high in fat, salt and sugar and not eating enough nutritious foods, including fruits and vegetables and fibrous foods. On top of this, we don’t move enough these days either, the reasons for this are many and we won’t bore you with them because we all know what they are!

Information and health campaigns from governments and health organisations appear to be having a very limited impact and aren’t halting this trend, so why is this?

For most of us, the way we make food decisions is less about the information about the food itself, more around what it looks like, how good it smells, how it is described and whether it gets us salivating to taste it. Even if a food was labelled ‘this product is full of fat and sugar and bad for your health’ it would not change our behaviour. This is due to four main reasons:

As humans we don’t like being told what to do by others
Most of us don’t have the willpower to resist
Usually nothing looks as tasty and tempting as the high fat, sugar and salt option, and nothing else is described in a way that makes us want to choose an alternative
Changing one factor about food environments in isolation does not work

Therefore, the idea that behaviour will change by providing more information is fundamentally flawed.

It’s important to know your behaviour change audience. Think about your customers in three groups…

The audience diamond showing the majority of customers are passive.

Proactive At one end of the scale we have the Proactive audience who are already aware of and care about their health and actively seek out opportunities to be healthy by eating well and exercising. Traditional health campaigns are likely to be noticed most by this audience, but since they already make good choices they aren’t really the target audience.

Disinterested At the other end of the scale we have the Disinterested audience who do see health information, but think ‘Pahh! You know what, life’s too short, I am going to die sometime anyway!’ In truth we all know people like this, be they friends or family or we have overheard others. This audience often live in the here and now and eat what they want, when they want and as often as they want, punctuated with multiple high fat, salty, sugary snacks throughout the day. In some cases they may not even be visibly overweight but are highly nutritionally deficient, which shows few outward signs. Historically this is the target audience for most health campaigns, and they are the least likely to take notice of the information they contain. In fact, they may be more likely to feel like they are being pushed and become even more stubborn in their behaviours and less likely to change.

Passive However, most of us fall somewhere in the middle and form part of the Passive audience. If healthier opportunities are the easy option, are attractive and we don’t meet barriers, then we will be more likely to make that choice. We aren’t necessarily motivated by ‘health’ messages, and instead by a whole range of different things including convenience, taste, ease, cost, what friends are doing, keeping family happy, fun, branding and so on.

Of course we need to know which foods are better for us in a simple way. For example, the Red Amber Green labelling on foods demonstrates the levels of fat, salt and sugar content, which is a step in the right direction. However, continued information overload just creates more noise and confusion in an already misunderstood market. It is far more helpful to modify our food environments to help make healthier choices the automatic choice for the Passive audience.

As the Passive majority start eating well and exercising more then we set a new social norm. We are heavily influenced by what those around us do and once the social norm reaches a tipping point, with the majority making better choice, even more people will follow. Rather than targeting the Disinterested directly, we are more likely to have success by targeting the Passives instead, and a small percentage of the Disinterested will join in once it becomes the norm.

This where Feel Good Family come in, and we keep our approach simple. We help people make automatic decisions in food environments that are better for them.

Our new book, Healthy Profits, gives you a window into how our minds really work when it comes to making food choices. It also gives loads ideas, backed by evidence and research from around the globe, about how to change the eating habits of customers (and keep them happy) whilst you still make a healthy profit. You can buy our ebook from Amazon by clicking our book cover below.

Healthy Profits Workshop – behaviour change training for food environments

Are you ready to throw away the rule book on all those healthy food messages, increase your custom, grow customer loyalty, improve margins and make a healthy profit? If yes, read on…

LABS Innovation have developed the UK’s first accredited behaviour change workshop for food environments. During our half day workshop you and your team can find out about what behaviour change solutions would work in your food environment and develop your own tailored plan to not only change eating habits, but also make a healthy profit.

Where we are now…

Eating patterns continue to change, the continued growth and choice of places to eat out is being driven by consumer lifestyle across all ages and the food market is highly competitive. Consumers are actively reducing their consumption of sugar and high fat foods (Kantar World Panel). Many factors influence our daily food decisions, but food choices are often impulsive and driven by emotions. The last decade has produced health information overload, and research shows consumers already know what they should eat. However, the current food offer pushes consumers towards less nutritious options (not great for impulsive food decisions!)

Barriers to making a change…

The biggest perceived barrier of food businesses to changing their food offer for consumer health is loss of custom and loss of profit. The current economic climate of rising food prices and inflation increases the pressure. Many food organisations care about consumer health, but maintaining a healthy profit is their priority, and rightly so – this protects and creates jobs. Many food businesses don’t have ready access to behavioural science in simple terms to enable them to change their offer for consumer health and maintain the same levels of custom.

The solution…

LABS Innovation have developed the UK’s first accredited Healthy Profits behaviour change training workshop for food businesses. The workshop:

Breaks down perceived barriers for food businesses
Embeds skills
Enables food businesses to build profits and customer loyalty
Builds knowledge of how behavioural science can be applied to food environments
Provides ideas of effective methods to guide consumers’ impulsive decision making towards more nutritious choices
Moves away from healthy food descriptions and heads towards the indulgent instead.

Presenting more nutritious foods with health restrictive ‘sugar free’ and health positive words e.g. ‘packed with vitamin C’ is a big turn off rather than a turn on (Stanford University). Eating out should be a pleasure after all!

This workshop combines all the best evidence based world research, enabling organisations to develop a plan tailored for their own setting that will not only create and maintain a more nutritious food offer for consumers, but maintain a profit and build customer loyalty at the same time.

The half day Highfield accredited workshop is suitable for organisations that care about the health of their customers, whoever they are, and recognise that poor food choices have a direct damaging impact on our lives and a wider economic impact. It typically costs £99/delegate but contact us for a quotation based on your requirements. Find out more about the workshop here.

Explore what else we have on offer in our store.

Behaviour change tip 1/3 How to increase sales of the healthier options in your grab and go lunch bar – prime location

Why traditional approaches to getting us to eat well and move more have little effect

Healthy Profits Workshop – behaviour change training for food environments

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