Food marketing
Put plant-based food where dinner is decided
By Prof. Alessandro Buffoli, PhD
I would test a dish beside its meal alternatives, with a description that gives people a reason to want to eat it.
If a restaurant wants more customers to order its mushroom dish, I would first look at where the dish appears and what the description lets me imagine eating.
A separate plant-based page may be useful to someone actively looking for it. It may be easy to overlook for someone simply deciding between several dinners. That creates a testable question about the menu, rather than a reason to assume customers have rejected the food.
There is relevant evidence on description. A Stanford-led study reported in 2019 found that taste-focused vegetable labels increased selection compared with health-focused labels in university dining halls. A crucial qualification was that the food needed to be credibly tasty. The study supports taking taste expectations seriously; it does not establish that moving every plant-based dish on a restaurant menu will increase sales.
Describe the actual plate
For a hypothetical dish, “roasted mushrooms with garlic, herbs and crisp potatoes” gives me more to evaluate than “our sustainable option”. The description must match what the kitchen serves. A useful ingredient or preparation tells the customer something; an unsupported string of enthusiastic adjectives does not.
Dietary and allergen information should remain easy to find. A better taste description should never require someone to guess whether a dish meets their needs. Nor should a restaurant imply that a plant-based dish is automatically suitable for every allergy.
I would compare a few specific presentations. One version could retain the current description. Another could describe the preparation and flavour more clearly. A separate test could examine placement among the relevant mains. Changing both at once would evaluate the combined offer, not tell us which element helped.
Watch what the new order replaces
More sales of the dish are not the whole result. Which other dish loses orders? Does overall contribution change? Are diners satisfied, and would they choose it again? A dish that sells because of a persuasive description but disappoints on the plate has created another problem.
The sustainability interpretation also needs care. An increase in plant-based orders is a sales observation. The environmental difference depends on the meals being compared, their ingredients and production. The menu experiment cannot supply that assessment by itself.
My starting point would be to make the dish a credible contender for dinner: appealing preparation, an understandable portion, a price that makes sense and a place where the intended customer will see it. If the food tastes good, the menu should give that quality a chance to do some work.
Prof. Alessandro Buffoli, PhD
Assistant Professor of Marketing at The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong.