Healthy Profits Archives - Page 2 of 2

Behaviour change tip 3/3. Reduce portion size of fries AND keep your customers happy – increase the perceived value

You’ve reduced your portion size of fries, so what’s next? How do you make sure your customers are happy and come back for more? Tip 1 of 3 was to change it up, tip 2 of 3 was to relabel your portion size descriptions.

Shape It Top Tips

Tip 3 of 3: Increase the perceived value

Instead of leaving your customers to focus on their portion of fries being smaller but being charged the same (which is likely to leave a sour taste in their mouth), think about how you can give them more perceived value. You want them to focus on what they are gaining, not what is being taken away.

Can you introduce an option of a sprinkle of tasty flavours that goes on their fries? A house special Cajun seasoning? Oven roasted with rosemary and garlic? A nest of fries surrounding your customer favourite homemade BBQ sauce? Or perhaps you will introduce a tasty salad with sweet peppers and vine ripened tomatoes on the plate so they don’t notice the portion of fries has decreased.

Follow us on social media to find out our next #ShapeItTopTips. Sign up to get updates to your email inbox, follow us on Twitter @healthy_profit, Facebook @healthyprofitsfgf and on LinkedIn. Also follow us on Instagram @healthy_profits as Tracey sails around the world finding out how feel good foods are promoted overseas.

Find out even more tips in our new book, Healthy Profits, including how you can use rewards, social norms, menu layout and descriptions 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!

Buy ebook from Amazon

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!

Behaviour change tip 2/3. Reduce portion size of fries AND keep your customers happy – relabel your portion size descriptions

You’ve reduced your portion size of fries, so what’s next? How do you make sure your customers are happy and come back for more? Tip 1 of 3 was to change it up!

Shape It Top Tips

Tip 2 of 3: Relabel your portion size descriptions

Portion sizes vary depending on where you eat. A portion of fries can vary anywhere from a small handful, to a massive pile atop a plate. There isn’t any consistency to how big a small, medium or large portion of fries should be. If you were to simply remove the large portion option from your menu, it may anger your customers.

Interestingly, how you describe the portion size on your menu has a powerful impact on how big your customers perceive it to be. A study by Aydınoglu and Krishna found that a portion labelled as small is perceived as smaller than exactly the same size portion labelled as medium. Also, a portion labelled as medium is perceived as smaller than the same size portion labelled as large. The only difference between the portions was how they were described.

So, how can you apply this research finding to your food environment? If you previously offered small, medium and large fries, then reduce the portion sizes as well as changing how you describe them. Relabel your medium fries as ‘large’, relabel your small fries as ‘medium’, and introduce an even smaller portion of fries and call them ‘small’. Remove the previous ‘large’ portion size from your menu altogether. Everyone will benefit from eating less fries, but they are unlikely to notice the change. Follow us on social media to find out our next #ShapeItTopTips.

Sign up to get updates to your email inbox, follow us on Twitter @healthy_profit, Facebook @healthyprofitsfgf and on LinkedIn. Also follow us on Instagram @healthy_profits as Tracey sails around the world finding out how feel good foods are promoted overseas.

Buy ebook from Amazon

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:

Aydınoglu, N., & Krishna, A. (2011). Guiltless gluttony: the asymmetric effect of size labels on size perceptions and consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(6), pp. 1095-1112.

Behaviour change tip 1/3. Reduce portion size of fries AND keep your customers happy – change it up!

You’ve reduced your portion size of fries, so what’s next? How do you make sure your customers are happy and come back for more?

Shape It Top Tips

Tip 1 of 3: Change it up!

We aren’t very accurate at estimating size changes. We underestimate portion size increases and think the increase is smaller than it really is. When a portion is doubled (a 100% increase) we estimate the increase as being only 50% to 70% bigger. This means super-sized portions aren’t judged as being as excessive as they actually are. Take a look at Chandon’s 2013 paper for more on this (see bottom of page).

However, we are much more accurate when judging how much smaller a portion gets. This means if you reduce a portion size, it is highly likely your customers will notice. Let’s say Joe Bloggs orders a burger and fries from your pub every week at his regular family get together, and then one week, the portion of fries has noticeably shrunk. Poor Joe is going to feel understandably shortchanged. The experience may leave such a negative memory that he then associates your food establishment with being money grabbing, or taking away his free will to eat what he wants, and his family might decide to try eating somewhere else next week instead.

One way to overcome this is to change it up. Make the plate look completely different to before. This will distract the eye and make it difficult to accurately judge the change in portion size of fries. You could serve the fries in baskets instead of on the plate, such as these from Amazon.

Or you could change what you serve the meal on, such as changing the size or shape of your plate, or presenting your food in a creative or novel way. For example, introducing a retro burger basked instead of serving on your usual white plate. There are many dishwasher safe versions of these on Amazon.

Not only will Joe Bloggs not notice the portion of fries has shrunk, but he may also be really impressed with the novel new presentation! Follow us on social media to find out our next #ShapeItTopTips.

Buy ebook from Amazon

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:

Chandon, P. (2013). How Package Design and Packaged-based Marketing Claims Lead to Overeating. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 35(1), pp. 7-31.

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?

Shape It Top Tips

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.

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!

Buy ebook from Amazon

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.

Behaviour change tip 3/3. Reduce portion size of fries AND keep your customers happy – increase the perceived value

Behaviour change tip 2/3. Reduce portion size of fries AND keep your customers happy – relabel your portion size descriptions

Behaviour change tip 1/3. Reduce portion size of fries AND keep your customers happy – change it up!

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

About

My values

I want to hear from you