Un-Meating Food Delivery Apps

Leading up to Earth Day this year, we’ve been thinking a lot about the impact our daily choices have on the planet and our own health. And how those choices—no matter how small—create ripple effects for our loved ones and the larger systems that support and connect us.

If we only had one thing to change to support the Earth this Earth Day, what would it be?

Oxford University’s Joseph Poore, the scientist behind our most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet, said:

“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car.”

Well, that’s pretty clear.

As 14 percent of all carbon emissions come from our current eating habits, changing the way we eat is crucial to prevent the climate crisis. Without a change in what we eat, agriculture alone could produce enough emissions to surpass our 1.5ºC goal. Swapping plants for meat just a couple of meals a week can make a huge dent in our overall carbon footprint. A global shift towards “healthy” eating has the opportunity to reduce 4.5 billion tons of emissions every year.

It’s a challenging culture to change. And we have at least some of the tools to make it happen.

The way we’re eating is already changing

We can start with where and how folks make food choices. More and more, delivery apps like Doordash, Grubhub, Dominos, Chipotle, Uber Eats, Instacart, Kroger, etc. are inserted into the way we make our hungry bellies full. There are dozens of these services, more every day, and they have real impact on our eating decisions.

In the wake of COVID-19, this food delivery category has been booming. In the pandemic’s first year, the markets were four to seven times larger than they were in 2018. Current forecasts estimate the global food delivery market will reach $128.5 billion by 2027, about 1% of the global food market.

Delivery platforms stand to continue their massive growth while they work out unlocking more profits with logistical, operational, and last-mile delivery improvements. They’ll continue to compete and consolidate as they accrue share of restaurants and share of stomach, but the category as a whole is showing no signs of slowing. In that way, these apps are quickly rising to compete with the paper menu itself as our primary interface for choosing what we eat.

As they do so, they have the unique responsibility to help us make good choices for our own health and for the health of the planet. At the very least to empower us to make an informed choice ourselves.

Accelerating the shift

Encouragingly, people, especially younger consumers, are already looking to make more plant-based decisions.

They’re driving a plant-based culture with social media holidays like Veganuary and Meatless Mondays proliferating on social media, and entire new social groups, like Flexitarians—who reduce, not eliminate, meat in their diets—emerging. According to a Sprouts study while vegans and vegetarians remain a fairly constant 5% of the market, more than half (54%) of respondents to ages 24 to 39 identified with a flexitarian diet, and 2/3rds of them believe their nutritional needs can be met on a plant-based diet.

We’re also seeing adoption of plant-based food innovation. Both dairy and meat plant-based alternatives are forecasted to grow through 2024, driven almost entirely by Millennials and Gen Zs, who are choosing these products for better health, and also because of their interest in sustainability and animal welfare, reports The NPD Group.

But despite these trends, we’re still very much in a meat-based world. Meat, as a share of the western diet, is at best flat. Globally, it’s expected to double by 2050. We have a hunch that an advertising and masculinity-driven culture machine subsidizes our meat-craze, along with actual government subsidies themselves (The U.S government spends $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, but only 0.04 percent of that (i.e., $17 million) each year to subsidize fruits and vegetables). Without going into the ills of politics and capitalism, companies in the food industry—especially those that have direct access to an individuals screentime—DO have a powerful role to play when it comes to accelerating the transition to choosing plant-based options. And here’s why.

By 2023, one-quarter of US smartphone users, 60 million of us, will have a food delivery app downloaded. Pairing that stat with the fact that choosing plant-based options has the potential to reduce carbon emissions by 65 gigatons 🤯 and also that these companies will soon need to report and reduce their Scope 3 emissions, there’s a huge opportunity here to make an impact that’s good for the planet, business and the individual, and make impact at scale.

This is where Climate-Centered Experience Design (CCXD) comes in. We believe CCXD has the power to shift food choices that lower emissions for these apps (and the world! 🌍).

Where should delivery apps start?

These experiences are built for humans—HUNGRY humans—with little patience and a complex system of needs to weigh to decide what they’re going to order and eat. They balance their own psychological needs and motivations with their body’s cravings, the value presented, and the attitudes around them. A dive into the behavior science of eating reveals a consistent cocktail of drivers.

1. Craving What we want deep in our souls
• Taste is the #1 factor in a diner’s decision making process. 79% of diners say “taste” is the main deciding factor in deciding where to eat.
• Customers eat with their eyes first. Cravable visual content, especially on their phones and in social media, that’s relevant and recent is a surefire way to get folks to want to try out new items - plant-based ones, too.
• Meat cravability sells, so battling that with equally crave-worthy plants is imperative to change their choices in the hungry moment. Keeping in mind, of course, that the narrative we keep around the tastiness of meat can cloud these taste experiences.
2. Convenience What’s possible, accessible, and available
• Most diners in the US decide what to eat within 2 hours before a meal, and typically using their phones, often using delivery apps as research, even if they’re going out to eat at a physical restaurant.
• The ease and speed of delivery apps have redefined what it means to be “fast food,” and increased the availability of plant-based options in inner city food deserts.
• In those places where healthy food comes at the expense of convenience, like time to travel or additional labor hours, it’s often sacrificed in favor of the more convenient option.
3. Value What feels like a bargain for the price
• Diners today don’t associate “value” with “low price” necessarily. Rather it’s a feeling that they’re getting more than they would expect—convenience, healthiness, fit with family preferences—at a surprising price.
• Healthy food, for people and the planet, is typically perceived as costing more, and often does, than unhealthy food. That perception is further reinforced by heavy advertising of processed food pricing, even when a fast-food-based diet is more expensive than a healthy one.
4. Culture What helps us fit into our community
• People wear the food they pick like a label. Whether they feel some affiliation with people in advertising, or if the food or restaurant is local, or if it’s just what they’ve always liked, their idea of their personalities have significant influence on what they eat. Food choices help form and reinforce identity.
• The culture of eating holds other emotional values as well, cementing relationships with family and friends. The locations and entrees they decide, like fast-food restaurants signaling high status in developing countries, cement social standing and bonds, and get used as rewards for achievements or celebrations. Haven’t we all had a great hamburger and beer after a grueling bike ride? ...Just me?
• Our immediate family, clearly, has perhaps the most significant cultural influence over our food choices. If you have a resistant family or partner, it’s unlikely that you’ll double the work and convert to plant-based on your own.
5. “Good for You” What makes us and our planet healthy
• In a working paper by WRI, the researchers found that environmental messaging alone on menus had a powerful impact on food choices.
• In the first few months of COVID-19, another study found that nearly 6 in 10 saw themselves eating fewer animal products, with their own health as the primary reason.
• Knowledge is powerful and people would be willing to eat a more plant-based, low-carbon diet if they had more information about how their food choices affected the environment.
• Plant-based food, too, isn’t without its health critics. Especially older folks, disinterested in changing their eating habits, often, without citation, doubt the nutritional value of plant-based diets. A doubt that, lacking curiosity to change, is unlikely to.

We can use these 5 decision factors, seen through a climate-centered lens, to guide how we change apps to create more plant-based ordering. Combined with smart design targeting, a clear understanding of what drives their behavior, and what has moved it in the past, we can improve their food ordering journey.

It’s clear there’s a big need, and delivery apps have a growing role in leading what people eat and what restaurants, grocers, etc. offer.

In our next post, we’ll use our CCXD approach to recommend experience improvements that can encourage people (who already say they don’t want to eat so much meat!) to choose plant based options.