The Dutch university of Wageningen has opened a restaurant of the future that doubles as a research lab. Cameras and other data monitoring devices will help the Center for Innovative Consumer Studies “find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel. We try to focus on one stimulus, like light,” said Rene Koster, head of the center, as overhead bulbs switched through green, red, orange and blue.

“This restaurant is a playground of possibilities. We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse,” he said. “The changes must be small. If you were making changes every day it would be too disruptive. People wouldn’t like it.”

From a control room, researchers can direct cameras built into the ceiling of the restaurant to zoom in on individual diners and their plates. They watch how people walk through the restaurant, what food catches their eye, whether they always sit at the same table and how much food they throw away.

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Koster said researchers can experiment with variables like noise, smells, furniture and food packaging. Is the same ham and cheese sandwich more appealing if it is wrapped in cellophane, under a glass cover or on offer in a vending machine?

They had already noticed that one table where the plastic chairs had pink flowery covers was always occupied.

Koster said observation is much better than questionnaires for consumer research as many choices are unconscious.

Interesting methodology (and findings) for understanding the factors that influence our eating behaviors at the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell

In an eight-seat lab designed to look like a cozy kitchen, Dr. Wansink offers free lunches in exchange for hard data. He opened the lab at Cornell in April, after he moved it from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he spent eight years conducting experiments in cafeterias, grocery stores and movie theaters.
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Although people think they make 15 food decisions a day on average, his research shows the number is well over 200. Some are obvious, some are subtle. The bigger the plate, the larger the spoon, the deeper the bag, the more we eat. But sometimes we decide how much to eat based on how much the person next to us is eating, sometimes moderating our intake by more than 20 percent up or down to match our dining companion.
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Moviegoers in a Chicago suburb were given free stale popcorn, some in medium-size buckets, some in large buckets. What was left in the buckets was weighed at the end of the movie. The people with larger buckets ate 53 percent more than people with smaller buckets. And people didn’t eat the popcorn because they liked it, he said. They were driven by hidden persuaders: the distraction of the movie, the sound of other people eating popcorn and the Pavlovian popcorn trigger that is activated when we step into a movie theater.

Dr. Wansink is particularly proud of his bottomless soup bowl, which he and some undergraduates devised with insulated tubing, plastic dinnerware and a pot of hot tomato soup rigged to keep the bowl about half full. The idea was to test which would make people stop eating: visual cues, or a feeling of fullness.

People using normal soup bowls ate about nine ounces. The typical bottomless soup bowl diner ate 15 ounces. Some of those ate more than a quart, and didn’t stop until the 20-minute experiment was over. When asked to estimate how many calories they had consumed, both groups thought they had eaten about the same amount, and 113 fewer calories on average than they actually had.

A sidebar listing other experiments and results is here (link may expire).

Harvey’s, a Canadian hamburger chain, has a pretty interesting combo deal. Order the sandwhich of your choice, and choose a side and a drink. Sides include onion rings and fries, of course, but also chips, and a salad. Drinks include soda pop, but also orange juice, or water. So you can order a burger, a salad (with dressing on the side), and a bottled water for the same price as a burger with fries and a Coke.

If you’re going to order a burger, it’s nice not to compound that with the other stuff, but I honestly wonder about the economics of this. Doesn’t a pop cost cents, at most (isn’t it highly subsidized by the Pepsi or Coke people?), versus a bottled water or Minute Maid juice? And even a salad that is mostly lettuce still appears to be handmade at some production facility, presumably at significantly greater cost than fries?

I know the fast food chains are all dealing with the obesity issue, at least in terms of PR, but this seems like the most encouraging and intriguing food offering I’d seen to date.