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
for the ever wealthier and larger population. The increasing interest in diet theory, the salience of food preference (Wansink, Cheney, & Chan, 2003), food allergies, (Bollinger et al., 2006; Mills et al., 2007), and bundling decisions (Liu, Haws, Lamberton, Campbell, & Fitzsimons, 2015; Myung, McCool, & Feinstein, 2008), suggest that bundling should be considered in combination with other design criteria for healthy, sustainable and profitable buffet designs. The unknown consequences of bundling – particularly bundling meat items with otherwise vegetarian items – have implications for both health and sustainability.
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
health. When two complementary products are bundled together, they can have unpredictable impacts on consumers. This impact, however, becomes more predictable as we learn more about who those specific consumers are since preferences vary among people (Liu et al., 2015; Wansink & Chandon, 2014). In other words, if a consumer is moderately favorable to each product contained in a bundle it may make them more likely to purchase the bundle rather than purchase each item separately. Controversially, if a person does not like one or two items in the bundles (such as vegetarian, allergic guests), considering the salad that has meat with it, that person is likely to reject a bundle. Bundling can seem like a productive strategy for increasing the attractiveness of complementary products, paired either because of their hedonic or utilitarian characteristics, such as perfumes or battery items (Chandon, Wansink, & Laurent, 2000). Hedonic products have been found to benefit more from complementary hedonic bundle items than utilitarian items (Chandon et al., 2000). Similarly, in the context of food, bundled foods can influence taste expectations for some items and make them more attractive to the general consumer (Liu et al., 2015; Wansink et al., 2013). In some consumer contexts, the lower price determines the attractiveness of a bundled option (Janiszewski & Cunha, 2004), but a low price does not make a bundle seem attractive if a consumer dislikes one of the elements in the bundle. In the food context, it could be a taste favoritism (sweet lovers), specific food avoidance (vegetarians), or allergy (nut allergy). For example, regardless of how attractive a salad bundle is, if it contains meats, vegetarian or vegan customers will reject it anyway – just like a salad containing nuts would prevent allergic people from taking any of it. This implies that offering bundled options can backfire on the choices of special customer groups.