Reducing meat consumption in restaurants: Exploring the default mechanism in a surprise menu, combined with effort and price incentives

Default options can be effective behavioural nudges in various contexts. Re-designing restaurant menus with vegetarian options as the default can be a promising route to reduce meat consumption. However, it is not yet clear whether the default also works when customers do not know what specific menu items they receive, as is the case in surprise menus. Furthermore, we question whether the effectiveness of a vegetarian default on an individual's choice for a vegetarian dish can be further strengthened when the default mechanism is deployed together with other strong intervention mechanisms: price incentives and imposed effort.

In a real-life field experiment, we tested the effectiveness of the default for a Chef's Menu where consumers only know that the dish is vegetarian or that it contains meat or fish. Moreover, we tested the effect of the default together with either a supplemental price needed to be paid for the meat option, or an increase in the effort to switch to the alternative meat options (making them less easy to order compared to the vegetarian option). Analyses of the sales data show that significantly more vegetarian options were ordered in the weeks that the vegetarian dish was the default. However, neither the price incentive nor the increased effort seemed to strengthen the original default effects. The current study shows the strength of a default intervention, also in the case of a surprise menu, and provides insights for practitioners to maximize the effectiveness of a default.