The aim of the MegaBites project is to assess the potential of existing and future measures to reduce the carbon footprint of catering on the EPFL campus. Food is one of the three main levers for reducing the climate impact of a campus, along with transport and buildings. One kilogram of food in our restaurants currently represents 4.7 kg CO2e in the atmosphere. MegaBites aims to reduce this footprint by a quarter to a third by the end of 2025. Emissions from meat menus are more than double those from vegetarian dishes. EPFL has successfully developed a vegetarian offer, with more than half of the 1.5 million meals sold on campus each year being vegetarian. In addition, all menus are vegetarian one day a week, and the all-vegetarian restaurant on the Ecublens campus is highly successful.
These measures are currently being evaluated, but are insufficient to reduce emissions further. Among the determinants of our food consumption, price is a sensitive component for multiple reasons. Even more so on a campus where more than 125 nationalities are studying and working together, with very different incomes levels and eating habits. For these reasons, MegaBites would like to test two hypotheses:
- Differentiated pricing for meat and vegetarian menus increases the consumption of healthy and sustainable menus.
- Pricing menus in proportion to their environmental impact is a strong signal to adapt consumption to climate challenges.
Scope
These initiatives will take place during the fall semester, which is the busiest time of the year in cafeterias, such that the number of changes can be minimised to achieve statistically significant results.
Only a few restaurants will be affected, and for each of them, only two to three menus will have their prices adjusted accordingly. The aim is not to carry out a study on the elasticity of demand, but to differentiate prices on the basis of current practices at EPFL. The MegaBites project team has used sales since 2022 and the carbon impact of the menus to estimate the differentiated prices.
These changes will also be limited in time, at most two weeks per menu and restaurant.
Observations
The changes implemented in the campus food system since 2019, at RESCO’s initiative, have made it possible to collect a great deal of data and monitor changes in the system using a range of indicators. This covers everything from the nutritional value of menus to the origin of products and their environmental impact. As part of this work, the MegaBites team will be analysing the data collected on an ongoing basis and carrying out occasional surveys.
Restaurant sales are the main data source of interest. This data is collected automatically and will only be transferred to MegaBites a posteriori, in accordance with a protocol established between the Data Science Laboratory (DLAB) and the Information Systems Department (DSI) and approved by the Research Office (ReO) Ethics Committee (HREC). These sales per menu and restaurant are aggregated according to status on campus (student, doctoral student or employee) corresponding to the price paid, gender and age class. As the EPFL community changes every year, this data has a limited validity period, one year maximum, i.e. until the end of the project, when it will be destroyed.
Expected results
The MegaBites approach to data analysis is to explore promising measures and their variants, with the twofold goal of (1) providing EPFL with tools to achieve its emission reduction targets and (2) improving our understanding of the determinants of our food consumption on campus. Ultimately, this will enable other universities with a similar offer to EPFL to benefit from it, while providing answers to questions about catering in the broadest sense.
The expected results are mainly changes in sales during the fall semester, by menu and restaurant. We have created the necessary conditions to isolate the effects of price differentiation in our observations. These will also be contextualized by the survey results. No speculation is being made at this stage about the effectiveness of price differentiation, but among the variations observed, three will be closely analysed:
- Number of meat and vegetarian menus sold per restaurant
- Total number of menus sold per restaurant
- Total number of menus sold
These interventions are part of a set of potential measures to improve production on the one hand and consumption on the other in the EPFL food system. In addition to the climate benefits, the results should also help to improve the nutritional value of menus on campus.