Smarter Lunchrooms: Using Behavioral Economics to Improve Meal Selection

At the same time, strong demands are placed on district school lunch programs to be financially solvent. With declines in property values and other income, school budgets are declining. While not run for profit, school lunch programs must keep participation levels high and must meet costs in order to preserve the education budget of the school district. Thus, school lunch administrators must also worry about what will sell. It may be possible to replace the standard cheese pizza on white flour crust with pizza smothered in spinach, artichoke hearts, and other vegetables on a whole wheat flaxseed crust. But the healthier pizza is more expensive, and fewer children may want to eat it. Hence many school districts walk a tightrope. School districts must increase the health content of their sales while trying to avoid any reduction in their financial viability. Eliminating the less nutritional items often means eliminating the meal budget’s highest margin items. Further, child patronage of the school lunch program is understandably dependent upon schools offering foods that students are familiar with and that they like, and that will satisfy their appetites. Economists and psychologists are developing a new set of tools that promise to help relax the tension between these two competing views of school lunches. These new tools are based in the emerging discipline of behavioral economics. Behavioral economics combines the behavioral models of psychology with the decision models of economics to help highlight how biases in perception, memory, or thought processes may influence purchasing decisions. This new approach helps us to identify the behavioral triggers that lead to the selection and consumption of healthier foods and healthier quantities of food. As well, we can determine the subtle and inadvertent signals that school cafeterias may send that trigger less nutritional eating. Moreover, many of the factors identified by behavioral economics can be exploited with very little investment. Much of the apparent tension between health and cost is due to the particular approaches taken to each problem. Introducing ultra-nutritious products into the lunchroom requires a significant increase in spending while risking reductions in unit sales and total participation levels. Banning popular items for their content also directly reduces sales. But suppose that instead of these drastic measures, we could simply rearrange items that are currently offered within the school to encourage children to buy more of the more nutritional items and less of the less nutritional items. Such a strategy costs very little, has a negligible impact on overall revenue, and may provide a way for school districts to show a demonstrable increase in the nutritional content of their meals. By using tools that will both increase the sales of more nutritional foods and decrease the sales of less nutritional foods, behavioral tools can achieve nutritional goals while having a minimal impact on the bottom line.