What unsustainable behavior needs to change: In 2013 when the Green Party in Germany demanded a veggie/vegan day in company, school or university canteens, the outcry was massive: “Cancel culture.” “Don’t take away our freedom!” “Political paternalism!”. The idea was not only to create awareness for a diet with less meat but to directly reduce emissions.

However we need to recognize that meat consumption is a big driver for CO2 emissions that expedites  global warming. Western Europeans eat 10x more meat than people living in India. Eating meat has societal as well as personal consequences: A fat-heavy diet often leads to obesity and severe health issues like heart attacks.

The problem: most often the negative externalities of meat consumption are hidden. Most people don’t know how much CO2 emission their steak is responsible for how a meat dish compares to a veggie option.

So the question is: how can we become choice architects that just nudges a decision instead of telling people what to do.

The Green Nudge: In a joint effort the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Aalto University wanted to examine if making negative environmental impacts like CO2 emissions more salient, would nudge people to adapt their choices.

In a 10 day field experiment in one of the biggest university canteens in Munich with over 8.000 visitors (during that 10 day time period), the researchers introduced menu displays showing the food option but also the environmental externalities like the CO2 footprint

The interesting bit: their experimental design included testing different options of how to visualize the negative footprint.

Variables were:
➡ the negative cost in €
➡ the amount of an individual’s daily CO2 budget spent
➡ the amount of CO2 emissions

They introduced traffic light colors: green for dishes with low CO2 emissions, yellow for more emissions and red for the “climate-killer-lunch”.

The result: the demand decreased for CO2-intensive choices with meat and fish and thus reduced the footprint of the total lunch menu. The researchers could observe the biggest effect when visitors learned how much environmental cost (in €) their lunch would cause. So making something intangible more salient resulted in almost 10% less CO2 emissions compared to days when they didn’t show any negative environmental impact on the menu displays.

What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

According to the Waste Resources Action Programme (WRAP) we waste a staggering amount of 88 million tons of food every year because of the expiration date. So, we are wasting food only because a print on the product says it has reached its end of shelf life- even if it was still good to consume.

The thing is: it’s often hard to say if food has gone bad or not. Of course there is the good old: “Look, smell, taste” but obviously this proves difficult for packaged food. It is hard to tell if food is safe to eat beyond the expiration date, unless you see some nasty mold on it. The process of decay is extremely abstract and people – when in doubt – prefer to  play it safe and throw it away. This is not only valid for people in front of their fridge. For retailers, it has a significant cost effect. When a product nears it’s expiration date, it often will go on discount or is thrown out. 

So one tool to reduce food waste would be something that makes the abstract more concrete. Some mechanism that extends the product and shelf life. If only the food or packaging could talk and stop this unsustainable behaviour.

The Green Nudge: To address this challenge, salient feedback can be a great nudge to trigger action. Feedback coming from the product. More precisely: from the packaging. 

London-based start-up Mimica came up with a game-changing, bio-inspired packaging innovation. Their Bump products are temperature-sensitive, dynamic expiry labels for food or beverages. The labels – coming a tag or cap – contain a gel filling that goes from smooth to bumpy at the same pace as the food inside deteriorates. This way they provides accurate, real-time feedback of the product’s freshness with a tactile interface. 

Mimica founder Solveiga Pakštaitė was inspired by the banana skin transformation which changes its colour and texture as it ripens. One of nature’s great ways to provide feedback: green = don’t eat, yellow = eat, turning brown = hurry, it will go bad soon.