How do you choose your meal when you dine out? A mixed methods study in consumer food-choice strategies in the restaurant context

Choosing meals in restaurants is a significant part of life. On average, people purchase seven meals per week from one of the over 17.5 million food outlets worldwide. The way people choose restaurant meals is different from how they choose foods they consume at home. Understanding people's decision-making strategies when choosing restaurant meals is critical for designing behaviour change interventions that prompt specific food choices (e.g., health, low emissions). Our study aims to identify meal choice strategies across various food outlets (Study 1) and determine their frequency of use (Study 2). In Study 1, we take a constructionist perspective and derive insights from 21 semi-structured interviews on strategies people use as they select meals in different food outlets. We identify 16 distinct strategies, with many people using multiple strategies within and across different restaurant types (i.e., general restaurants, fast-food, pubs, and upscale restaurants). In Study 2, we quantify which of those 16 strategies are most frequently used. The most used strategies were searching the menu for (1) the most enjoyable meals, (2) the most budget-friendly meals, or (3) familiar meals (i.e., habitual choices); and choosing from those. Few people searched the menu for the most environmentally friendly meals and chose from those. These results could explain the limited effectiveness of carbon labelling at restaurants. Our study calls for future interventions on prompting environmental or healthy food choices to move away from health and environmental labelling and to focus on enjoyment, price, or habit because these are important for people when choosing a meal. We also created a practical measure of the 16 food-choice strategies, available for researchers to use.