The nudging dinner plate

Eat your veggies! That might be a daily struggle at dinner time. This smart dinner plate offers a solution: it stimulates kids to subconsciously eat more and ensures that a child follows the healthy eating behavior of their parents more easily.

A variety of scientific insights about human behavior and nudging are translated into physical features that influence eating behavior:

• mirroring: a child’s brain constantly mirrors what their parents do. The plate is therefore made of ceramic and round, just like that of mum or dad.

• more is more: If there is more of something on your plate, you automatically eat more of it. A deepening in the plate ensures that you can serve more vegetables, without it appearing more.

• Delboeuf illusion: The plate is larger than a normal children’s plate, which makes the portion of vegetables appear smaller. For the brain, the meal seams more manageable now. And by omitting a raised and colored border, this effect, the so-called Delboeuf illusion, is enhanced.

• within reach: Food that is closer to you ends up in your stomach more easily. So, always place the plate with the vegetables facing your child.

• tastier by color: A white surface makes our brains find the vegetables more attractive and thus more tasteful. The deepened area for the vegetables is the whitest spot on the plate. This helps to make the vegetables even more attractive compared to the rest of the meal.

Bon appetit!

More info and literature study: https://hak.nl/hethelpendebord (in Dutch)

Now available at: De Bijenkorf

Design and visual by Waarmakers, DDB Unlimited and HAK Groenten.

Produced in the Netherlands by Royal Goedewaagen