Awarded: £4,500

Twisted Orange will run visual focus groups (VFGs) with secondary school pupils to better understand how school meal choices can be promoted to encourage increased uptake of more sustainable food items. The project will be targeting school children aged between 11-16 as the ‘consumer’ – a demographic that continues to eat too much saturated fat and sugar and not enough fruit and vegetables. The project findings will inform menu development as well as the use of visual communications to ‘nudge’ consumer/pupil behavioural change.

Key findings

• Pupils are engaged in the topic of sustainability, however, they related to the term ‘good for the planet’ rather than sustainability or environmentally friendly.
• Co-creation encouraged engagement to aid in educating children about how their food choices can have an impact on the environment.
• Initial results show some positive switch to more sustainable meal choices, a 3% increase. 

Recommendations for further research and activity

• When the children queue for lunch they are ‘very hungry’ so focused on what they can eat rather than what they should eat. Simply making all dishes more environmentally friendly would be an effective solution to have a positive impact on the carbon footprint of school meals. Torfaen CBC has actively been targeting the carbon footprint of their red-meat-based dishes to do just this.
• Roll out the visual toolkit and measure impact from a wider audience.
• Repeat the activity and analyse whether engagement at a younger age impacts meal choice more/less effectively.

Poster Presented at the AFN Big Tent 2025