How to design a healthy refrigerator.

Think about the last time you were hungry. If you are like most people you open the refrigerator and look to see what you have.  The top shelf may have eggs, meat or cheese. The middle shelves may have unlabeled Tupperware with aging soup from several days ago. You may even find take out Chinese food or a doggy bag. Now look at the bottom of your refrigerator, this is where the food that you should be eating is stored. Inside of the two drawers is where you keep your vegetables. Lettuce, tomatoes, celery, onions and carrots, for some reason all of these vegetables are the hardest to get to. Not only is the healthy food hard to reach, but it is also hidden behind drawers creating a further barrier to choosing these foods.

In a typical refrigerator, the unhealthy foods are at eye level.

Given this arrangement, it is no wonder why the food that you choose to eat is the meat or cheese when you are snacking and you ignore the veggies until they become a rotting mess in their bag and you have to throw them out.

Behavioral science has an explanation for this type of behavior called Availability Bias. You encounter this bias the day after you buy a new car. As soon as you start driving your car, you realize how many other cars there are on the road that look exactly like yours. You notice things that are familiar and ignore things that are out of sight. Grocery stores have this down to a science. Foods that they want to sell with higher margins are placed on the top shelves while generic brands and non-impulse items are placed lower. Most people with children make frequent trips to the store just to purchase milk. Rather than make life convenient by placing the milk near the front of the store, it is placed in the back of the store causing people to pass all the isles of food. If you really want something, you will find it but it is hard to pass up the other foods that are at eye level.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book “Nudge” share an example from school cafeterias. One cafeteria changed the location of the food in the cafeteria line and recorded what foods where chosen. They found that they could directly influence what foods people ate merely by changing the order of the food. Foods that were placed first were chosen over foods that were placed near the end of the line regardless of teenagers’ natural aversion to veggies.

If a manufacturer really wanted to make a healthy refrigerator, they would make it easier to find the healthy foods. Instead of placing the veggie drawers at the bottom of the refrigerator, they should be placed on the top shelf at eye level. Furthermore, the crisping drawers should be eliminated. Instead some sort of automatic opening mechanism should be created that opens a door when the main refrigerator door is opened. This way, the food would be fresh but still easy to access. 

The veggies should be placed at eye level in your refrigerator.

Next time you open your refrigerator, think about where things are placed and try to keep your healthy food at eye level and hide the unhealthy food in the drawers at the bottom.