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Need customers to crave more vegetable sides? Research suggests small servings, separate plates

August 29, 2019

Restaurants hoping to play up the desirability of certain high-cost menu items, while trimming portion size, might want to pay heed to the findings of new University of Georgia study around presentation psychology when it comes to food. 

Basically, the research that focused mostly on the "psychology" of how vegetable presentation affects overall consumption shows people eat more vegetable and vegetable-based items when they are presented in smaller separate units or what study authors called a "partitioned format." 

Oddly, this followed earlier research showing that when it comes to food people really love, like high-end desserts and the like, showed presentation in that format by doing something like wrapping a chocolate individually, as opposed to serving four or five chocolates on one plate tends to cut overall consumption because it makes consumers more aware of the amount they're eating. 

"Each decision point offers a reminder that they should stop, and so increasing the decision points actually decreases consumption," lead study author and UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Associate Professor of Psychology Michelle vanDellen said in a release about the findings.

However, researchers theorized that if foods that are often less appealing to the majority of consumers — like vegetables and other low-fat, low-sugar foods — might actually be consumed more, if presented in individual units. 

"People need to initiate self-control to consume vegetables," vanDellen explained in the release. "More decision points might require more initiation. Separating food into a unit might reduce decision points. Because people also have an intrinsic desire for completion, they may be more likely to finish a unit or serving, even if these are made of relatively unappealing options."

To test their theory, researchers ran experiments in which they randomly presented cauliflower with all the pieces on a single plate, or in separate smaller servings, then they measured consumption. They found that though both groups ate about the same total amounts of cauliflower, presentation did affect consumption overall since most people only at a single piece of cauliflower when the all four or six pieces were heaped onto a single plate. But when separated into partitioned servings they typically didn't stop at one piece and were more likely to eat all four or six partitioned pieces. 

Study co-authors were, in the UGA College of Public Health Assistant Professor of health policy and management Janani Rajbhandari-Thapa and UGA Terry College of Business Marketing Department Associate Professor Julio Sevilla. The paper is published in the journal Food Quality and Preference