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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

>When the proportion of meatless options doubled from one to two of four choices, overall sales remained about constant. But sales of meat-containing meals dropped, and sales of vegetarian meals, such as “wild mushroom, roasted butternut squash and sun blushed tomato risotto with parmesan”, rose 40–80%.

So they cut the available meat options and doubled the available vegetarian options and find it surprising they sold more vegetarian food? Making things unavailabile does tend to have that effect.

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Many people, instead, would expect the percentage of meat to vegetarian sales to remain constant, as they believe that meat-eaters wouldn't choose a vegetarian option. (And some people still don't consider it a lunch or dinner without some sort of meat.)

Well throw out the entire meat/non-meat idea. And instead replace meat with expensive dish and non-meat with inexpensive dish. They went from offering 1 inexpensive dish to 4 inexpensive dishes. Its really not surprising when you quadruple the number of inexpensive dishes you will see an increase in the number of inexpensive dishes sold.

Now if the meat dishes were the same price as non-meat dishes you would probably still see a small spike in sale of non-meat dishes when you quadruple the number of options, but the price is to big of a variable to ignore, especially with University students.

It shows people pick interesting sounding options from a range with little care to whether it has meat in or not. We’re in such a meat dominated society that the current change is showing how flexible we actually are to fitting in with more eco ways of eating.

>It shows people pick interesting sounding options from a range with little care to whether it has meat in or not.

Thats probably true, but I think more importantly it shows people pick the more inexpensive options from a range with little care to whether it has meat in or not. In other words if the non-meat dishes were more expensive than the meat dishes, the sales would have been different.

Did it say they cut the meat options?

It seems they simply increased the number of vegie options from the cursory single 'meatloaf', and that did the trick.

I've recently become "much more vegie", and honestly I look forward to many of the vegie meals more than those with meat. I think meat should be reserved for meals where it can really shine; steak, ribs, bacon, etc.

Pies, curries, soups, casseroles, etc can often do without meat entirely, or with much less, or just with added meat stock.

I think this is the first step to the future of food.

I often choose the vegetarian option when eating out simply because I know how to grill a steak or roast some chicken at home— I can make those meals just as well as they can, and for half the cost or less.

When I see multiple vegetarian meal options, that's a signal that the chef isn't just doing a low effort protein swap-out but is actually offering something tasty and interesting, and I'm interested to try it.

Yeah, that's the difference I don't think they really looked at. if the quality of the vegetarian food is better than the meat offerings, that would definitely help drive sales.

> When I see multiple vegetarian meal options, that's a signal that [...]

I use whether it's called something like 'vegetarian <blah>' (as a signal for the reverse).

I don't want a 'vegetarian lasagne', or 'vegetarian burger'.

A slightly different but similarly ridiculous one is 'vegetarian chili con carne', which means 'vegetarian chili with meat'.

We just call that chili sin carne. I gave it to my non-vegan family and they couldn't tell the difference. It's a really great dish, quick to make (faster and easier than with meat), healthy, high in protein and tasty.

I really don't get what the issue is here? There are also great bean/nut/mushroom burgers, that don't intend to taste like meat burgers.

Why can't vegan dishes use the same form factor as non-veg dishes? Does everything just have to be a bland plate of veggies for us?

I can't speak for the parent, but my feeling about it is that I don't like food pretending to be other food. So yes, serve me up a mushroom burger or a falafel burger, or a winter black bean and kale burger. But if the menu says simply "veggie burger" then there's a pretty good sign that it's an imitation and not made from whole food.

Now, none of this is implying that the veggie meal should be a "bland plate of veggies", rather it's that there are whole cuisines out there with delicious plant-based meals that have stood the test of time. If I'm eating vegetarian, I want one of those meals, not a meat meal with the meat swapped out.

I don't have a problem with the form of food itself, it's just that 'vegetarian burger' tells me only what it isn't, it could be (almost) anything!

I wouldn't buy a 'vegeterian <thing>' for the same reason I wouldn't buy a 'meat <thing>' - it just sounds crap and like you don't know what you've made you just knew you needed a vegetarian (resp. meat) option.

Huh. I do the opposite—I order meat out (not always, but sometimes) and rarely cook it at home. I can and every now and then do make good dishes with meat, but find it fussy, messy, and very expensive if you screw it up. Plus I have trouble with the leftovers (leftover chicken almost always has a really, really bad flavor to me, for example).

Veggies have their own PITA issues, of course. I just prefer to put up with those rather than those and meat's issues, in my home kitchen & pantry.

[EDIT] another factor's that I don't really care for most cheap meats. Ground beef? Eh, no. Shredded chicken from a can? God no. Cheap fish available this far from the ocean? I'll pass. Carne asada (expensive these days), a great steak, good sushi? Hell yes. But I'll leave it to the pros so I don't wreck an expensive piece of meat, no more often than I get that particular craving.

That's fair. I'm mostly cooking on the weekends, for a family of five, so doing something like a 4lb roast chicken with potatoes and veggies is a pretty economical and straightforward meal. Everyone gets their fill, but there's enough left for at least one lunch portion or maybe even a second dinner like chicken Caesar wraps.

I don’t think it’s as obvious as you imply. If a menu goes from 80% meat to 20% meat, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that either the same proportion of customers still chose a meat option; or that fewer customers ordered anything to begin with

I don't think that most people go "I want meat!", they just want something that sounds good, and that's what the results are reflecting. As eating meat is the default option, it's largely done without thought - you don't internalize "I eat meat", so it has no value if you do or don't in a particular meal.

Idk. I think most people read the menu and decide what sounds best, with meat options rated fairly high.

If a menu switches from 80% meat to 20% meat, I (as a meat eater) would find somewhere else to eat. On the other hand vegetarians might start to come to this place. This place might sell more vegetarian food, yet nobody will have to convert to vegetarianism.

Similarly, this is about cafeterias. Sometimes food runs out. Hell, the meat option always runs out on airplanes until food gets to me. If they reduce the meat even more, no wonder that more people will eat vegetarian dishes. There's no meat left.

That’s a good point. It would be neat to look at credit card data and infer how much of the customer base is new

> It would be neat to look at credit card data and infer how much of the customer base is new

The study did track people over time: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/09/24/1907207116

"Linking sales data to participants’ previous meal purchases revealed that the largest effects were found in the quartile of diners with the lowest prior levels of vegetarian meal selection."

So the heaviest meat eaters as a group not only did not stop going to these cafeterias, they willingly ate the vegetarian stuff.

Probably it is just laziness: if the next closest place to go for lunch is few miles away and your office cafeteria goes vegetarian then you simply find few least bad vege options and stick with them.

Before the intervention there were three meat options. The intervention reduced this to two meat options. How in the world is this "going vegetarian", forcing you to eat the least bad non-meat options?

How is reducing your choices (for one meal per weekday) to 20% of the menu about anybody having "to convert to vegetarianism"?

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