SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Nutr.
Sec. Nutrition and Sustainable Diets
Higher Education Institutions and the Use of Marketing-Mix Choice Architecture Strategies to Encourage Plant-Rich Menu Options and Sustainable Dietary Patterns: A Scoping Review
Nicole L. Furr
Jessica R. Spence
Eojina Kim
D. Enette Larson-Meyer
Elena Serrano
Vivica I. Kraak
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract
Introduction: Higher education dining services can leverage their institutional food procurement and marketing influence to accelerate and support eating patterns and food environments aligned with planetary health. Although behavioral economics and nudge-based choice architecture offer low-cost tools to shift demand, sector-wide evidence on how university and college foodservice operations apply these marketing-mix choice architecture strategies beyond the lab and trials in dining settings is limited. Methods: We conducted a systematic scoping review (2010–2024) across five databases, Google Scholar, grey literature resources, news articles, media releases, and targeted organizational websites to identify United States higher education institutions applying marketing-mix choice architecture strategies to encourage customers to select plant-rich menu options. We categorized evidence describing higher education institutions use of behavior change strategies into eight marketing-mix choice architecture strategy domains: place, profile, portion, pricing, promotion, default picks, priming/prompting, and proximity. Results: The search yielded 363 reports covering 166 higher education institutions located across 36 states and the District of Columbia. Institutions most commonly used profile (96.99%) followed by priming/prompting (45.18%), promotion (39.76%), portion (15.66%), default picks (10.24%), proximity (6.02%), pricing (5.42%), and place (1.20%). Discussion: Our results contribute to the knowledge to practice gap by revealing how higher education institutions have used behavioral economics strategies to encourage sustainable dietary patterns. This study may provide guidance for university decision-makers, campus dining and foodservice management, and researchers aiming to foster sustainable food environments by documenting the interventions that are commonly applied by higher education institutions at scale beyond the lab setting.
Summary
Keywords
Choice architecture, Foodservice, higher education, Marketing-mix, nudge, plant-rich dietary pattern, sustainable dietary pattern
Received
23 December 2025
Accepted
18 February 2026
Copyright
© 2026 Furr, Spence, Kim, Larson-Meyer, Serrano and Kraak. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Nicole L. Furr
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.