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Objective 1: Consumer Choice Experiment

• Our analysis of participants and their choices suggests that, among participants who selected at least one item, displaying calories on menus reduced the energy amount ordered by 30 kilocalories. Providing calorie information did not affect participants' satisfaction with choices they made or their ratings of restaurants.
• Providing calorie information typically had a statistically significant effect in standard meal–type restaurant settings. In contrast, there was no effect of labeling menus with calorie information on the number of calories participants chose in the three nonstandard meal–type establishments.
• Participants shown menus with calorie-labeled items and those shown menus without labeling were similarly likely to pick the highest-calorie items. However, participants shown the calorie information were less likely to choose items in the 800–1,000 kilocalorie range and more likely to choose items in the 400–500 kilocalorie range than those who were not shown that information.
• In this study, we saw a very strong direct association of sociodemographic characteristics with calories ordered. However, there was no interaction effect of seeing calorie-labeled menus with observable characteristics, including gender, age, education, income, race/ethnicity, or body mass index, on calories chosen. In other words, we found no evidence that the effect of providing calorie information varies by sociodemographic characteristics across all menus.

Objective 2: Evaluation of Menu Changes over Time

• We found no statistically significant evidence of a change in calories per menu item between 2010 and 2015 for the menus of major chain restaurants.