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 further reduce emissions. So-called “nudging” measures are known to effectively encourage the consumption of more balanced and sustainable menus. The nutriMenu label, which measures the nutritional value of a menu, or the presentation and descriptions of menus are common nudging examples. Unlike price changes however, these measures do not change the scope of food services, but the context in which menus are presented. Nudging-type changes will be implemented to test their potential for reducing food-related emissions.
Scope
These interventions will take place during the spring semester in several restaurants over short time intervals, allowing for statistically significant results with minimal changes.
The MegaBites team relied on sales data collected since 2022 to validate these changes and modify the context for only a few menus. The impact on consumers should therefore be very limited.
Observations
Improvements in the campus food system since 2019, at RESCO’s initiative, have made it possible to collect detailed 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 spring semester, by menu and restaurant. We have randomized the changes to provide the best observation conditions. No speculation is being made at this stage about the effectiveness of nudging, 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 on campus
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.