Making oat milk the default option for cafe drinks while still offering cow’s milk sharply increased the share of plant-based milk use in real-world testing, according to a new UK study.
The peer-reviewed research, recently published in Global Environmental Psychology, suggests that the default switch to oat milk — described as a “default nudge” — may lower the milk-related carbon footprint per drink by 25-34%.
The small-scale study used an “ABAB” experimental design to test an operational change — namely, using oat milk as the default — at the Barjon cafe on the campus of Plymouth Marjon University in the UK. A second campus cafe was used as a comparison location.
At the Barjon cafe, the baseline use of plant-based milk prior to instituting oat milk as the default was 16.6%. That jumped to 51.9% when baristas informed guests oat milk was the default option, with signage at the cafe saying the change was “for environmental reasons,” while other milks were available by request. During the second trial at the same cafe, the baseline for plant-based milk was 23%, then jumped to 46% with the oat milk default nudge.
At the comparison cafe, plant-based milk shares stayed in the low teens throughout, with no corresponding jump during the weeks the default was applied at the Barjon cafe.
Milk Choice and Climate Goals
For the study, he focus on milk choice was framed as a practical way for the university to work toward “net-zero” goals for greenhouse gas emissions.
The research team applied published greenhouse gas emissions data for dairy, oat and other milk types used, producing an estimated “milk-based carbon footprint per drink.”
Using two different reference data sets, the estimated average milk footprint dropped from roughly 0.79 kilograms of CO2-equivalent per drink in the first baseline phase to about 0.56 in the first oat-default phase. Across the full test, the result was an estimated 25-34% reduction per drink, depending on the reference data set used.
Those numbers only reflected the milk in the drink, not other complicating factors such as the carbon footprint of the coffee, packaging, other ingredients or physical cafe operations.
“These findings highlight the potential impact of default nudges on reducing the environmental impact of animal agriculture by encouraging plant-based diets among consumers and provide implications for the adoption of plant-based milk default nudges in university cafés and more widely across the food sector,” the study states.
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