#1146 2017 · Meituan / Ele.me · Food delivery / plastics
Chinese delivery apps flipped cutlery to opt-in and no-cutlery orders rose sixfold
the problem
Every delivery order in China came bundled with plastic cutlery whether the customer needed it or not
background
China's food delivery industry processes tens of millions of orders a day, and for years the checkout default bundled a set of single-use plastic forks, spoons and chopsticks into virtually every one, regardless of whether the customer was eating at home with a full kitchen drawer five feet away. Because taking the cutlery cost the customer nothing extra and skipping it required actively unchecking a box most people never looked at, the vast majority of orders shipped with cutlery nobody asked for and often never used, feeding a mounting plastic-waste problem researchers and regulators had flagged as largely uncounted and unaddressed.
Public awareness campaigns about plastic waste already existed and had done little to change ordering habits, because remembering to manually decline cutlery on every single order asked customers to overcome inertia dozens of times a month for a benefit — slightly less landfill plastic somewhere else — they would never personally see or feel.
what everyone would do
The available levers were public awareness campaigns asking customers to remember to decline cutlery, and after-the-fact recycling programs for the plastic once discarded — both of which required overcoming the same default-option inertia on every single order, and neither of which changed what showed up in the bag unless the customer took an extra deliberate step.
what they saw
The checkout default was not neutral — it was deciding for millions of people who never saw a choice. Nobody needed convincing plastic waste was bad; they just needed to stop being auto-enrolled in producing it.
the move
Meituan became the first major platform to add an easy 'skip cutlery' option with a green-incentive donation tied to it in 2017; Ele.me went further in 2019, flipping the checkout default itself in pilot cities so that no cutlery was included unless the customer actively opted in, reversing which choice required an action.
why it works
The platforms saw that the checkout default wasn't a neutral technical setting — it was doing the deciding for tens of millions of people a day who never noticed there was a choice to make, and reversing it required changing one bit in the app rather than millions of individual minds. Because most customers are indifferent at the moment of ordering — they don't actively want cutlery, they just don't actively not want it either — whichever option requires zero extra taps wins by default, regardless of which way that default points. Flipping it from opt-out to opt-in doesn't ask anyone to sacrifice anything: a customer who genuinely needs cutlery still gets it with one tap, while everyone else, who was never going to bother declining it, now simply doesn't receive it. The entire behavior change rides on inertia rather than persuasion.
the payoff
A 2022 Science study found the default flip increased no-cutlery orders by over 600%, projecting 21 billion fewer sets a year nationwide.
where it breaks
It only works where the true preference distribution favors the new default — if most customers really do need the bundled item most of the time, flipping the default just shifts the friction onto the majority and generates complaints instead of savings. It also requires that opting in remains genuinely easy (one tap, not a buried settings menu), or the platform will simply lose orders from customers who needed the item and couldn't be bothered to find the toggle.
what came after
China's National Development and Reform Commission subsequently set a policy target of cutting disposable cutlery use in takeout by 30% by 2025, citing the opt-in redesign as a model, and the same default-flip has since spread to other delivery markets and other bundled extras (napkins, condiment packets) that platforms previously included automatically.
references
- [1]Reducing single-use cutlery with green nudges: Evidence from China's food-delivery industryScience, 2022science.org
- [2]Chinese study finds food delivery apps could drastically cut plastic waste by 'nudging' users to skip cutlerySouth China Morning Post, 2023scmp.com