Behavioural Insights Team cut drinking by moving alcohol-free drinks to menu top

Public health interventions aimed at reducing alcohol consumption typically work on price (taxes, minimum unit pricing) or availability (licensing hours, outlet density), on the assumption that what changes drinking behavior is what's for sale and what it costs — not how the menu listing it is laid out.

The Behavioural Insights Team ran large-scale randomized trials across the UK, Germany and Mexico — more than 11,000 participants combined — testing different menu presentations of the same drink selection at the same prices: NoLo options integrated at the bottom of each alcoholic drinks section, versus NoLo options moved to the top of each section, so a customer had to actively scroll past the alcohol-free choice to reach the higher-alcohol ones.

Reordered the unchanged drinks list so NoLo options came first, exploiting the default to what's presented first, cutting alcohol ordered by 15% with no revenue loss.

Customers default to the first option they see, so top placement surfaces the alcohol-free choice before stronger drinks.

The change touched only ordering, not products or prices, so it isolated menu position as the causal lever.

Because the fix required no regulation or cost, venues could adopt it unilaterally, enabling large-scale trials.

Average spend held steady, so the intervention reduced alcohol without hurting revenue, making it sustainable.

Before changing price or product, test whether reordering the choice list itself shifts behavior toward the preferred option.

In the UK, the top-placement version cut the amount of alcohol ordered by 15% and made participants 30% more likely to order at least one alcohol-free or low-alcohol drink, with similar reductions in Germany and a larger effect in Mexico; critically, average spend per order held steady across all three countries, meaning the change reduced alcohol consumption without reducing what customers paid.