Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
The US Food and Drug Administration's Nutrition Innovation Strategy focuses on enhancing consumers' ability to "seek and identify" healthier food products. The growing occurrence of preventable deaths due to poor nutrition and unhealthy diets has increased the urgency for clear nutrition labeling and education information for consumers. The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee in their 2015 Advisory Report also recommended providing consumers information on sustainable diets. In our pilot study, consumers in a restaurant setting indicated their willingness to shift away from animal-protein meals to plant-based options when presented with information about the meal's environmental costs. Comprehensive informational approaches that integrate health and environmental benefits could encourage consumers to choose healthier and sustainable meals. Enhanced restaurant menu offerings of such meals and related information could positively impact the sustainability of consumers' food choices given the increased expenditure on food-away-from-home. In this Strengthening Seed Grant, we propose to investigate demand and supply factors to improve menu labeling, and availability of healthier and environmentally-friendly meals. Successful conclusion of this seed grant will lead to a broadly focused standard grant proposal of national scope. Specific objectives are:Evaluate consumers' willingness to pay for access to health and environmental footprint information on restaurant menus.Determine the challenges and obstacles restaurants face to offer information on, and choices for, healthier and environmentally sustainable meals.Identify feasible training and extension programs that would provide guidance to restaurants on how to offer healthier and sustainable meals, and associated information.
Animal Health Component
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Research Effort Categories
Basic
100%
Applied
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Developmental
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Goals / Objectives
Thisproposalis aligned to the US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Nutrition Innovation Strategy of helping consumers "seek and identify" healthier food options. The long-term goal of this project is to enable the restaurant industry to offer a larger range of healthier and environmentally sustainable meals, and to provide them with the tools to adequately signal to consumers the health and environmental impacts of meal choices. This long-term goal addresses FDA's ongoing efforts to improve sustainable diets (DGAC, 2015) among Americans, particularly as expenditure on food-away-from-home increases. Successful completion of this Seed grant will lead to a standard grant with a national scope.Specific objectives of this proposal are:1. Evaluate consumers' willingness to pay for access to health and environmental footprint information on restaurant menus.2. Determine the challenges and obstacles restaurants face to offer information on, and choices for, healthier and environmentally sustainable meals.3. Identify feasible training and extension programs that would provide guidance to restaurants on how to offer healthier and sustainable meals, and associated information.
Project Methods
Thefollowing methods will be used to accomplish each of the three objectives:Objective 1:Measures.Consumer samples will be representative of national demographics for FAFH in chain and independent restaurants (n=644; confidence level=99%; margin of error=5%). Data will be gathered within a two-stage experimental design format.Stage 1.Consumers will be asked to respond to questions related to general perceptions of eating out, and of choosing between menu options. For the opt-in treatment, the decision to opt-into the information treatments occurs at the end of Stage 1.Stage 2.Participants will be asked to make their food choices based on the menu information provided to them (nutrition label, environmental label, both). Menu items will be controlled to ensure salience of information interventions. Participants will be asked additional questions related to their perceptions of food. These consumer studies will be conducted at PSU in the School of Hospitality Management's restaurant facilities, and participants will be recruited locally. PI has sufficient experience conducting such consumer field experiments.Second decision-making stage of choosing food products will be observed by controlling study menu options designed with a variety of food ingredients representing different types of nutrition and environmental footprint levels; such as animal proteins versus plant-based, and locally produced and scratch prepared foods. Menu design, foodservice design, and product prices within the six settings will be systematically manipulated. Attribute changes will be linked to price changes so that willingness to pay is observable.Menus, information intervention, and online survey responses will be QR-coded for real time data collection and analysis. In order to minimize the effects of cognitive overload, both nutrition and environmental footprint information will be provided in the form of a synthetic label (reference our pilot study). Nutrition evaluation for restaurant items will be presented using FDA guidelines, while environmental footprint will be presented using the comprehensive approach adopted by Lukas et al. (2016) for environmental impact (land use, water footprint, carbon footprint, and material footprint).Data Analysis.WTP for the access to information (value of information) will be estimated with non-parametric techniques used in contingent valuation of the shares of subjects that accept the information in the opt-in treatment at various price points. The data on meal choices will be analyzed using discrete choice econometric methods including mixed and latent class logit models. The discrete choice models will use the price variation and information treatments in the direct-provision treatment arm to estimate the WTP for healthier and/or more environmentally friendly meals. Estimated WTP and changes in purchase frequencies will be compared to respondent demographics and consumer perceptions. We will also evaluate the impact of information treatmentsconditionalon opting in, but these results are not causal due to subjects' opt-in choice.Objective 2:Subjects/Unit of Analysis.Study 1:Restaurants (n~10) (PA, NE) will participate in this study so we can assess challenges and obstacles of offering information and choices of healthier and sustainable menu options (See enclosed letters of support).Study 2:A survey of restaurants (n~300) (PA, NE) will be conducted to validate Study 1 findings. Respondents will be recruited through a market research firm. Restaurant inclusion criteria will include chain and independent restaurants, in rural and urban locations, and a variety of dine-in environments.Measures. Study 1:Restaurant management will be tasked with the objective of: 1) identifying and developing one or more menu items that meet the nutrition and environmental-footprint (sustainability) measures; and 2) develop the menu item information, and planning for offering the menu item to the extent possible. Menu planning and information creation experiences will be documented, and where possible measures of time/effort and monetary process costs will be included into an activity-based costing framework. The research team will conduct three interviews with each participating restaurant (beginning, middle, end of data collection). Participants will also respond to weekly online surveys with rating scales and open-ended questions. Menu planning activities will include: developing recipes, finding ingredients, contacting and establishing ingredient availability, and process related costs. Activity cost categories will include monetary and non-monetary costs, and categorized based on fixed-variable costs, controllable and noncontrollable costs, and transaction costs (information search, contract negotiation, and monitoring and enforcement). Most estimates will be developed based on these categorizations. The contextual framework for developing cost indices will be restaurant income and cash flow statements.Study 2: An online survey will be created based on findings of Study 1 to validate the processes and associated costs for offering healthier and sustainable meal options.Data Analysis.Study 1:Transcriptions of audio-recorded interview discussions will be used to assess patterns and categorize the data. A combination of manual and software analysis (NVivo), and qualitative analysis approaches will be used such as: memoing, coded concept identification and their categorization into themes, and analysis of patterns in final codes. Cost estimates will be used to stimulate quantitative measures of expenses to develop menu options and consumer information. WTP estimates (Objective 1) will also be used to simulate cost-benefit analysis and decision analysis models. PI has developed such models in the past for the restaurant industry (Sharma et al., 2020).Study 2: Quantitative data from survey responses will be analyzed using a combination of linear and log-linear regression models, and non-parametric statistics. Dependent variables will include assessments of acceptability and willingness to adopt menu enhancements. Process obstacles, and estimated costs will be used as independent variables. Variables of restaurant type and size will be used for robustness checks.Objective 3:Data Collection.Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with restaurant participants (n~10; PA and NE). Participants will be asked to identify training needs, and feasibility of a variety of delivery approaches. Based on this data, a categorization of training and extension programs will be identified for various types of employees such as front-line staff and management. Varied delivery methods of such programming will also be incorporated in the categorization schema, such as in-person versus virtual, and asynchronous versus synchronous. Topics of content areas for such training will also be identified that would most effectively reduce the challenges and obstacles restaurants face in offering menu options, and related information on health and environmental sustainability. Interview responses will be used to create a survey to collect self-reported online responses from a larger sample of restaurants in PA and NE (n~300) to verify the categorization of training and extension programs, feasibility of approaches, and programmatic content topics.Data Analysis.Qualitativedata from restaurant interviews will be analyzed similar to the approach presented in Objective 2. Quantitative data from survey responses will be analyzed using a combination of linear and log-linear regression models, and non-parametric statistics.