Want to get your kids to make healthy lunch choices? Ask your child’s school lunchroom to make this one simple change to get kids to eat more fruits and veggies at lunch.
In 2009, the New York State Department of Health gave a handful of schools near Lake Placid $3,000 grants to see if they could increase the amount of fruit sold to students by 5 percent. The DOE asked Brian Wansink, Ph.D., and his team, “How much do these schools need to drop the prices of fifty-cent apples and pears in order to sell five percent more of them?”
In his book Slim By Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life, Dr. Wansink reveals what the schools needed to do: “‘Don’t lower the price. Just make two changes. Put the fruit in a nice bowl and set it out on a well-lit part of the line.’”
Three of the five schools made that exact change, and in 3 months, fruit sales were up 103 percent. The fourth school put the fruit in a bowl and added a nice desk lamp to highlight the fruit in “an apple-pear spotlight dance” saw a 186 percent increase in sales. The final school didn’t make any changes and saw no improvement in fruit sales.
Making this small change made the food look attractive and yummier, Wansink said. “If it was in their faces, it was on their plates.”
Try making this change at home too by putting fruit in a bowl on the counter rather than in the refrigerator crisper, and you might just see a jump in ‘sales’ during after-school snack time.
Also see:
Helping Kids Make Healthier Choices in the School Cafeteria
