Higher Education Plant-Rich Menu Marketing Strategies in the United States

A scoping review documents 166 higher education institutions across 36 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. It categorizes their use of eight marketing-mix choice architecture strategies to encourage plant-rich menu options, based on evidence from 363 reports collected between 2010 and 2024.

Use Cases

• Analyze the prevalence of the 'profile' strategy, used by 96.99% of institutions, to understand dominant marketing approaches.
• Compare adoption rates of 'pricing' (5.42%) and 'place' (1.20%) strategies to identify underutilized behavioral tools.
• Map the geographic distribution of the 166 institutions to identify regional patterns in sustainable dining initiatives.
• Study the application of 'priming/prompting' (45.18%) and 'promotion' (39.76%) strategies for designing effective campus nudges.

Strengths

• Documents a specific scope of 166 higher education institutions.
• Categorizes evidence into eight distinct marketing-mix strategy domains with reported adoption percentages.
• Based on a systematic review of 363 reports from multiple sources.

Limitations

• The dataset is a 638.4 KB PDF document, not a structured tabular dataset, limiting direct computational analysis.
• Evidence is limited to U.S. institutions, excluding international contexts.
• The review covers reports from 2010-2024, but individual case timeliness may vary.

Provenance

Source

Figshare, authored by Nicole L. Furr.

Collection Method

Systematic scoping review across five databases, Google Scholar, gray literature, news, and organizational websites.

Time Range

2010 to 2024.

Freshness

Last updated March 2026, based on a review covering 2010-2024.

Geography

United States (36 states and the District of Columbia).