WP2 - Setting up experimental restaurants

Understanding eating behaviours, their motivations, their inter-individual variability, and their temporal dynamics is a difficult undertaking that can only be achieved through interdisciplinary approaches to be developed in an everyday situation of consumption. This second work package concerns the equipment and development of 2 experimental restaurants: Paris Saclay and Dijon.

The studies in collective restaurants should indeed enable researchers to understand, model and predict the effects of the determinants of food behaviour during consumption and to establish relationships between food properties, practices and health. Adjoining university restaurants, they will be able to receive different target populations, such as students, workers, seniors or specific populations. It will facilitate a better analysis and understanding of food preferences, choices between foods and dishes on the menu, but also the decisions about the quantities chosen, consumed and wasted. In addition, these restaurants will enrich the analyses of the impact of consumer behaviour on all the sectors, and could include the study of the evolution of the behaviour of all the actors (producers, restaurant owners/processors and consumers) to encourage a healthier and more sustainable diet. These both restaurants seek to mimic a context close to collective catering with a self-service condition.

First in the Paris Saclay restaurant, the ambition is thus to equip it with some instrumentation that will guide the development of new foods, the automatic collection of data (choices, movements of guests in the self-service area, consumed / not consumed quantities, conditions of consumption of the meal, digital survey data) and a rapid, reliable and flexible monitoring over time of the variables of interest in an environment that is perfectly controlled and can be modified by the experimenter, so as to respond to a diversity of needs. The use of equipped restaurant will permit to develop innovative and interactives methods to answer to the three ambitions below (Cfr. 2.1.). The list of main equipment required for data acquisition is described in the table of tasks of the project. The restaurant, separated from the university restaurant with direct access from the outside, is currently equipped with: i) a kitchen (to contribute to the design of innovative food products, by their composition, their formulation or their process) directly linked to the CROUS kitchen to facilitate the transfer of dishes, ii) a self-service area with a cold zone, salad bar + hot food area, iii) a modular dining room for 20 people and a waste sorting area, iv) an office for simple physiological measurements and individual interviews, and v) an office for computers managing the video system. The experimental restaurant will be designed and managed in interaction with the CROUS, the manager of the university restaurant. It will be also an opportunity to reinforce connections between research teams, food producers and food chain stakeholders.

On top of that, the restaurant must be modular: the equipment must be able to ensure data acquisition regardless of the configuration and the number of participants. Beyond the purely technical aspects, we will have to set up monitoring tools and indicators of the platform's operation and efficiency. First experiments can be carried out very quickly without automation but with data acquisition by experimenters. As the equipment is installed, test experiments will be carried out to ensure that it works and that the services are synchronised. After each validation point, new experiments can be carried out with an increased level of automation.

Second, in Dijon, L’Institut Agro is also leading a project to create a new space dedicated to food including an experimental restaurant ("l'Auberge", opening in 2025) and a space for demonstrating culinary techniques (opening in 2023, funded). A catering service will be offered every day at the ‘Auberge’ by the CROUS Bourgogne Franche-Comté for approx. 200 consumers The ‘Auberge’ will be equipped to allow the observation of consumers at lunch time in real life (students and staff of the university campus). The originality of the ‘Auberge’ will be to propose a daily food offer in line with dietary guidelines to protect environmental and populational health with an additional aim of education on these aspects. The ’Auberge’ will be equipped to collect food choices data, consumers perceptions of the food offer and food waste. In terms of consumer education, diverse interventions could be implemented. The evaluation of their impact on consumers will be facilitated by the data recorded every day at the ‘Auberge’. For instance, knowing how to cook is one of the levers for changing food behaviour and interventions based on cooking training could be performed in the space above the ’Auberge’ that will be dedicated to demonstrations of cooking techniques. These demonstrations can be carried out by CROUS chefs. The goal of this project will be to build a new place that fulfils the Institut Agro Dijon and the CROUS public service mission to provide healthy and sustainable lunches and that gather data real-life food consumption. In the ‘Auberge’, the scientific community will be welcome to experiment and collect data on eating behaviour to better understand barriers and levers towards healthier and more sustainable diets.