Consumer food and drink decisions – summary
- Researchers challenge long‑held belief consumers make 200 daily food choices
- MPI analysis shows original study inflated numbers through flawed methodology
- Subadditivity effect distorted estimates of unconscious food‑related decisions
- Scientists argue people make informed contextual choices across eating occasions
- Findings urge manufacturers to design products supporting conscious decision making
It’s a long‑held belief that consumers make around 200 food and drink decisions a day.
And that figure – often repeated in industry presentations, trend reports and marketing decks – has become something of a staple reference point when discussing shopper behaviour.
What’s more, it’s shaped how many brands, retailers and researchers think about decision fatigue, cognitive load and the need for simplified, friction‑free experiences on shelf and online.
But, while it continues to be heavily referenced, it appears to have originated from one single piece of research – the Mindless Eating report. Now, nearly two decades later, scientists are questioning its findings.
Do consumers really make 200 decisions a day?
“This number paints a distorted picture of how people make decisions about their food intake and how much control they have over it,” says Maria Almudena Claassen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPI).
Claassen, along with her colleagues Ralph Hertwig, director at MPI, and Jutta Mata, an associate research scientist at MPI, have published research examining how this number became so influential.
Their work shows how questionable measurement methods can shape public understanding of eating behaviours. And, more importantly, how they can be wrong.
Going back to the 2007 study, we see that 154 participants were asked to estimate how many food and drink decisions they made each day. The result? An average of 14.4.
They were then asked to break down their choices for a typical meal into categories, including when, what, how much, and where.
This is where the numbers started to skew.
The research team – US scientists Brian Wansink and Jeffery Sobal – multiplied this second set of numbers by the number of meals, snacks, and beverages participants said they consumed in a typical day.
When combined, the result was significantly higher than the first – an average of 226.7.
The difference between the initial estimate and the larger total, 212.3 decisions, was interpreted as evidence that most food choices are unconscious or “mindless”.
MPI’s Claassen, Hertwig, and Planck argue this conclusion is “flawed”.
And their criticism is scathing, blaming methodological and conceptual weaknesses, along with the presence of a cognitive bias called the ‘subadditivity effect’.
What is the subadditivity effect?
The subadditivity effect describes a tendency for people to give higher numerical estimates when a broad question is divided into several specific parts.
When food decisions are counted piece by piece, totals naturally rise.
According to the MPI researchers, the large number of supposed “mindless” choices reflects the cognitive pattern of the subadditivity effect, rather than an observed reality about how people eat.
They also warn that repeating simplified claims can shape public perceptions in harmful ways.
It can “undermine feelings of self-efficacy,” says Claassen. “Simplified messages like this distract from the fact that people are perfectly capable of making conscious and informed food decisions.”
They contend that food choices should be examined in context, instead of being reduced to a single headline number.
Meaningful questions, they say, include what’s being eaten, how much is consumed, what’s avoided, when the choice occurs, and the social or emotional setting surrounding it.
“To get a better understanding of eating behaviour, we need to get a better grasp of how exactly decisions are made and what influences them,” says MPI’s Hertwig.
What this means for food and beverage
For manufacturers and retailers, the collapse of the ‘200 decisions’ claim is more than correcting an old industry trope – it opens the door to a deeper understanding of how consumers actually think.
For years, this statistic has underpinned assumptions about decision fatigue, simplified packaging, friction‑free merchandising, and the belief that shoppers move through stores and digital aisles in a largely automatic, mindless state. But if that foundation is flawed, so too is the idea that consumers are passive actors who must be shielded from complexity at every turn.
The MPI researchers argue that people are far more capable of making conscious, informed decisions than the 200‑choices narrative suggests. And that should give manufacturers pause.
If food choices are less mindless and more contextual, then strategies built solely around reducing cognitive load won’t be enough.
Instead, manufacturers may need to shift towards empowering decision‑making rather than oversimplifying it.
That means:
- Designing products and packs that inform, instead of simply streamlining
- Offering clearer cues about nutrition, provenance, processing, and sustainability
- Recognising the influence of social, emotional, and situational context on food choices
- Building innovation pipelines that reflect how people actually live and eat, not how a single 2007 study once suggested they did.
Ultimately, the takeaway for manufacturers is that consumers aren’t overwhelmed by an avalanche of unconscious micro‑decisions, they’re navigating a complex food environment with more intentionality than they’re given credit for. And brands that acknowledge that nuance, and design for it, stand to be the ones that earn trust, loyalty, and long‑term relevance.
