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

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, gray 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 and their 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.