Product Bundling

There is an ongoing debate on how people can be encouraged to eat healthier by selecting more salad and less meat. This study investigates how bundling of salad with chicken can influence guests to eat more of this, and reduce their selection of meat. Product bundling is a common price marketing strategy to encourage customers to buy more or larger amounts of the combined products. However, it has not previously been explored how bundling can influence food choices when price is not the determinant factor for the consumers’ choices. Bundling often comes in the form of combining two or more complementary items or ingredients (Harris & Blair, 2006; Stremersch & Tellis, 2002), and foods are usually combined in both traditional (fish and chips) and familiar ways (chicken with Caesar salad). Un-bundling is a question of whether food items should be disaggregated or separated to make their distinct components more attractive to more people. To bundle or un-bundle food items may seem like a minor issue that does not deserve much attention, but it is likely to have health implications for an increasingly obese population and sustainability implications
More immediately, it also has key implication for day-to-day food decisions that are made in most cafeteria and buffets around the world. We investigate this notion of bundling in a real life context involving the selection of salad. Salad is a food item that can be easily and naturally bundled with other enhancements, such as chicken. Bundling or un-bundling may seem like a simple one-time decision, but multiply it by thousands of diners across thousands of lunches, and it can have sizable implication for the individual health as well as global sustainability. The consequences of making such decision are discussed with a focus on both sustainability and