January 10, 2023

Increased likeliness for fast food consumers to buy non-beef alternatives with climate labels used, study finds

When fast food restaurants disclose the climate change impact of menu items, customers place orders that are supposedly less harmful to the environment, a recent study concluded.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University found placing "high climate impact" labels next to hamburgers caused orders of non-beef alternatives such as veggie burgers to increase by 23% compared to a control group. They also found that placing "low climate impact" next to dishes with a lower carbon footprint, such as salads and chicken sandwiches, increased orders of those items by 10%.

"These results suggest that menu labeling, particularly labels warning that an item has high climate impact, can be an effective strategy for encouraging more sustainable food choices in a fast food setting," the study's lead author, Julia Wolfson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in a press release.

The study was conducted online between March 30 and April 13, 2022. More than 5,000 participants were shown a sample menu resembling a fast food menu and asked to choose one item for dinner. One group was shown menus with labels for only "high climate impact" meals, one with only "low climate impact" labels, and one with no labels at all. The findings were published online on December 27 last year, in the JAMA Network Open, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"Shifting current dietary patterns toward more sustainable diets with lower amounts of red meat consumed could reduce diet-related [greenhouse gas emissions] by up to 55%," the Johns Hopkins researchers noted in the journal article.

- Yahoo! News