@Vegg&Cheese – A Nudge towards a flexitarian diet & healthier consumption behaviours
1. What is the observed insight?
Dietary guidelines for a planetary health diet go toward flexitarian behaviours with more vegetables and less meat. These recommendations are not easy to apply due to food preferences and questions on optimal portion size and food categories associations. Providing a simple solution grouping several recommendations vs. a flexitarian diet is a useful “Nudge to push” consumers towards healthier eating behaviors.
2. The Nudge
As a leader in the cheese sector, Savencia Fromage & Dairy is willing to play a significant role in helping consumers to adopt healthy and responsible eating behaviours.
The objective of our Nudge @Vegg&Cheese is to “push” consumers to adopt a flexitarian diet and to eat more vegetables and less meat by proposing tasty and balanced recipes in which cheese, as an alternative to meat, is associated with vegetables. It has been designed in a collaborative and innovative approach, between Savencia/quiveutdufromage.com and two partners: SIGA, nutrition experts proposing a holistic vision of healthy diet and a food classification based on the degree of processing (www.siga.care) and ScanUp, a digital shopping list application (www.scanup.fr).
The recipes are made available to ScanUp users through the app which offers the possibility of automatically generating a shopping list containing all the ingredients for the chosen recipe and to follow the shopping behaviour of users. A declarative dietary questionnaire has been also sent to users within the app, before and after the Nudge experience to measure changes in consumption behaviours.
We have chosen to activate several drivers: “easiness & immediacy” by using a smartphone shopping list application that is close to the act of purchase. All recipes are analysed and validated by SIGA who acts as the “transmitter”. The driver “emotion” is activated in the app through attractive pictures of the recipes including cheese, creating “the desire for the proposed recipe”.
3. Evidence path
The impact of the Nudge was demonstrated via a 6 weeks study. The behaviours evolved positively towards a flexitarian diet with more vegetables & less meat and the right portion of cheese. 56% of exposed persons declared to have increased their vegetable consumption.
This Nudge opens the door to an innovative use of food classification systems and nutrition applications towards healthier consumption behaviours.
