R&DE Stanford Food Institute Leads Research in Campus Dining Halls

Cutting-edge research can be found anywhere and anytime on Stanford’s campus – even at the dinner table. “In support of the academic mission of the university, the R&DE Stanford Food Institute (SFI) and R&DE Stanford Dining, Hospitality & Auxiliaries (SDHA) have a long history of collaborating with faculty in all seven schools on cutting-edge, transdisciplinary research that uses campus dining halls as living laboratories,” said Dr. Shirley Everett, senior associate vice provost, R&DE, and senior advisor to the provost on equity and inclusion. R&DE is co-founder of the pioneering Menus of Change University Research Collaborative (MCURC), a global network of 70 colleges and universities scaling research through multi-site studies and collective impact projects. This year, SFI and SDHA continued that tradition, teaming up with three faculty partners across campus to conduct innovative new studies.

SFI partnered with Dr. Szu-chi Huang, associate professor of marketing and R. Michael Shanahan Faculty Scholar in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Winnow, an artificial intelligence food waste measurement company, on a year-long study to test the impact of a motivation science framework to reduce student food waste. Identifying evidence-based strategies that reduce student food waste and instilling sustainable habits during this transformative time of their lives holds tremendous potential for enabling consumers to actively reduce their food waste, in institutional settings and beyond. 

SFI also supported the work of Dr. Maya Mathur, assistant professor in the Quantitative Sciences Unit (Biomedical Data Sciences) and the Department of Pediatrics in the Stanford School of Medicine. In her Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, she assesses portion size as a meat reduction strategy. This aligns with SDHA’s existing Food Choice Architecture Playbook to support healthy, sustainable, delicious food choices for every student. 

The third new collaboration was with Dr. Jennifer Aaker, the General Atlantic Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, on an innovative approach to nudging healthy food choices by testing how attention to beauty can improve health without undermining taste. This exciting collaborative project stands to complement strategies from the MCURC’s DISH Study and the Edgy Veggies Toolkit, which were led by Stanford researchers and dining staff several years ago and uncovered the power of taste-focused labels to boost vegetable consumption.

The results of these studies can promote students’ health and well-being as well as advancing campus-wide sustainability goals through reduction of food waste and an increase in plant-forward diets.