University of Tennessee: Decoding the Impact of digital ordering on food choices
06 Aug 2024 | University of Tennessee
Annika Abell, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, discusses her recent research on digital ordering in the restaurant industry. She reveals the impact of digital platforms on consumer behavior, including a rise in unhealthy food choices and increased spending, and provides insights for food and beverage businesses navigating the digital ordering landscape.
I'm Manvisha Manjal, senior journalist with Food Ingredients First.
I'm here today with Anika Abel, who is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Anika is the co-author of a new study on digital ordering in the restaurant industry.
Her research reveals how digital platforms are influencing what we eat and how much we spend.
Welcome, Anika.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me.
So, my first question is, what motivated you to explore the impact of digital ordering on consumer behavior, specifically in the restaurant industry?
Mhm.
So this, this project started a few years ago, even before COVID, so we were mostly looking at people ordering food on websites, and more and more people were doing that, so we were interested to see do people behave differently if they order food online?
Do they order different things, and then COVID happened and.
And the food ordering process became even more common, right?
We saw the QR codes, the ordering kiosks, all the food delivery aggregators like Uber Eats, Grubhub became very common.
And so that made us even more interested to see how will this influence what people choose and what people order.
Yeah.
And what were the different environments or settings that this study was conducted in?
So we started off with control lab experiments, with undergraduate students where we gave them paper surveys or tablets or computers, to answer the surveys, so they saw the menus in these two different environments.
We did paper, and computers because we wanted to keep the anonymity of both processes, right, to make sure that people make those choices anonymous in both of those modalities.
And so we kept it the most controlled in those settings.
Then we also conducted studies in, in the field, in actual restaurants.
So some of these are field experiments, but we also gave the, restaurant visitors or patrons, a paper survey or a tablet to again keep this anonymity in the process.
And so they made those choices in the actual restaurant environment.
And then we also had actual sales data that we analyzed where we coded.
The choices into healthy and unhealthy options and then we looked at how the people order.
But obviously those people selected the, the process of how they made that order, right?
How they placed it online or in the restaurant, and then they placed those orders with the wait staff.
So, yeah, we had a couple of different settings, just to make sure that we can show that this That this effect that we found is very robust.
Great.
And so what were the key findings of this study and how do you think they compare to non-digital modes of ordering food?
Mhm.
So across all these different settings, we found that overall, people choose relatively unhealthier when they make this choice, on a digital device.
So that includes an ordering kiosk, a website, with the phone, And as compared to when they make that choice on paper or with the weights, so people choose unhealthier.
We also found in one study, some evidence that people might also spend more money when they make those choices on a digital device, and we found that the effect overall is a little stronger in the evenings when people are, you know, already more cognitively depleted from their day.
And so they're even more likely to then choose indulgent options on a digital device.
And would you say that that was the most surprising finding of your research, or is there something else that left you more surprised?
I think, yeah, that, that piece, the evening, but also just this general idea of, the extension of this Google effect, right?
So, we, we have some evidence that people, tend to be a lot less cognitively involved when they use computers.
A search engines, because we see it as an extension of our memory, and the same thing seems to also happen in a food choice environment, right?
So, I have this digital device, so I'm less likely to use my brain as much.
I'm a little more, mindless when I make that decision.
That's really interesting.
Is there anything else that we know about Google effect in the context of this study?
Yeah, so in this study, The Google effect just really means that when I have this digital device in front of me, I'm just a little less involved in the process.
All right, so I'm going on a little more of an automatic faster mode, and I don't think as much about the choice that I'm making.
So we see the Google effects.
Kind of in, in our everyday life, we tend to not memorize phone numbers as much, right?
We have them all stored in our phone.
We don't know our, you know, best friend's phone number anymore.
We use the GPS for everything, and we don't remember where do we have to turn even on our everyday commutes.
And so it's, it's a similar thing in this context, right?
I have this device, so I'm just a little less involved in this decision.
That's really interesting, especially with just how dependent we're getting on technology without actually realizing it and how it affects our food choices as.
My next question is about the significance of this study for food and beverage players and how can restaurants and business owners use these findings to their benefit.
Yeah, so, I think it really depends on what kind of restaurant it is, right?
So if you're a restaurant or a business that really is positioned as one that offers a lot of unhealthy items, and that's the goal to sell, then this digital technology can really be helpful to some extent.
Because people choose unhealthier and obviously, there are additional benefits or reasons why people introduce this technology in restaurants because you can replace the wait staff, right?
There are cost savings in introducing these kiosks.
But then you can also kind of take more of a, a public policy angle, right?
So, do we really want people to make these unhealthy choices for themselves, or can we nudge people to make better choices?
So just this, evidence that we have that people might just choose or spend more and maybe they can buy more.
So maybe restaurants could also instead of Add a side of french fries or add another dip.
Say, hey, add a side salad or add something healthy to, you know, kind of like a balancing effect.
So, on those digital devices.
So I think those are all things that maybe restaurant owners can take away from the study.
Great.
Also something for us to think about as as.
How do you see the role of digital ordering evolve in the next few years, and what are your expectations for this research?
I, I really think that this is obviously not going away, right?
We will see, especially those kiosks, I think will become way more common also in different types of, of restaurants.
We currently don't see them very much in high-end restaurants, so it's going to be interesting to see.
How this is going to evolve in, you know, the different types of restaurants that we have.
Is it going to stay a thing in like a, a quick service environment?
I think that for future research, what I really think is interesting is to see these, these hybrid environments, right?
So we have the kiosk, but we also have the wait staff.
We may have the menu available on the screen, but we may also have it on a paper to pick up.
So how's that going to play a role when these different modalities interact with each other, but also how people make this choice to enter this restaurant and then I have to decide, am I going to use.
The kiosk or am I going to talk to this person to place my order?
What motivates those choices?
So I think there's still a lot that we can study in the future that will be very interesting to see how people behave.
Mhm.
And I was just thinking of what role AI could play in this research because we saw reports of McDonald's, for example, installing, AI powered order processing machines and then also pulling the plug on them eventually because they kept getting the orders wrong.
Do you see any relation between AI technology and, the findings of this research, or is that something that could be leveraged to , offer better choices to consumers in a way that doesn't negate their cognitive involvement.
Interesting.
Yeah, we haven't, we haven't done anything with, with AI in this context.
I guess it would be interesting to see if, if these ordering kiosks had some kind of algorithmic ability of putting the best option for you together.
It would depend on how this is programmed, but yeah, given that people are less cognitively involved, maybe that could be used for some benefit, right?
If we can get these, Algorithms or, you know, whatever it will be.
If it's AI or more like a, like a chatbot type of thing, if if they could.
Put more balanced meals together just from a macro perspective.
That would be very interesting to see if consumers, especially on the digital devices where they are less cognitively involved, maybe they will go more, with those suggestions.
So, yeah, I think that could be very interesting.
It's all a matter of if this is going to be used for the good, right, of the consumer.
For sure.
Thank you so much for sharing those insights with us, Anika.
Yeah, of course, any time.
