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The Food and Brand Lab is a non-profit research facility at Cornell University, led by Brian Wansink, which focuses on why people buy and eat the foods they do in the quantities they do.
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The findings of the lab are widely published in medical, marketing, nutrition, and psychology journals. They have also been summarized in the best-selling book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (2006) and in Marketing Nutrition (2005), and they have been widely reported in the popular press.
The validity of the lab's research has been called into question, with a 2017 investigation discovering "150 errors in just four of [its] papers, strong signs of major problems in the lab’s other research, and a spate of questions about the quality of the work that goes on there," as summarized by New York Magazine.
History
The Food and Brand Lab—originally known as the "Brand Lab"—was first established by Brian Wansink while he was a marketing professor at Dartmouth College (1990-1994) and focused on individual food choices. The Lab was then transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1995-1997), where its findings began to be noticed by major media outlets. The Wall Street Journal helped raise the Lab's profile when it reported the findings of a series of studies on how package size influences how much food people consume on its front page. The finding that large packages can lead consumers to eat an average of 23% more food than an unconstrained smaller package provided systematic empirical evidence as to how one's immediate environment can bias them to unknowingly overeating. As the first major article on how an implied portion size influences intake and calorie consumption, it helped launch the introduction of mini-size packaging, including the popular, premium-priced 100-calorie packs.
As the Lab began focusing more and more on consumer welfare and nutrition, Wansink moved the Lab to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was hired as a joint professor of Nutritional Science, Marketing, and Agricultural and Consumer Science. At this time, the newly christened Food and Brand Lab was formally institutionalized, and it broadened its focus to study the environmental factors that unknowingly influenced what a person eats and how much they eat.
To better investigate the interdisciplinary nature of food intake, the Lab recruited researchers from psychology, food science, marketing, agricultural economics, and nutrition, and it broadened its international appeal by incorporating researchers from France, Germany, Korea, India and the Netherlands. At the same time, the Lab has been involved with a licensed research restaurant (the Spice Box), and enlisted the cooperation of grocery store chains to serve as test sites to study a wide range of grocery shopping behaviors.
In 2005, Wansink moved to Cornell University, and the Lab was newly constructed in the Department of Applied Economics and Management in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The new Food and Brand Lab is composed of a multipurpose set of interlocking rooms equipped with one-way mirrors, hidden cameras, and hidden food scales built into tables. The Lab's main research room can be altered to imitate a kitchen or dining room, and in this context, researchers can vary the factors they believe influence food intake and selection in a more naturalistic setting.
In cooperation with the Consumer Education Foundation, the Food and Brand lab sponsors Consumer Camp on the campus of Cornell University on one of the first two weekends in April. This provides a full-day "hands-on" opportunity for people of all ages to learn how to improve what they eat, how much they eat, and how much they enjoy food.
Findings
Research from the Food and Brand Lab has been credited with improving the deeper scientific understanding of food as well as the discovery of some simple everyday insights: