Portion sizes in American restaurants shot up in the 1980s and never came down. The average serving of spaghetti and meatballs doubled. Bagels ballooned into six-inch-wide monstrosities. Burritos started to weigh more than a Harry Potter hardcover.
Nutritionists and policymakers haven’t had much success fighting portion creep, which has been linked to health problems associated with obesity. Attempts to legislate soda sizes were shot down. Calorie counts on menus have largely gone ignored and might even be harmful. Even celebrity-dusted public health campaigns from the White House didn’t move the needle much.
But today, a combo plate of economics, demographics and climate science may accomplish what years of official hand-wringing could not: loosening the grip that super-size restaurant portions have on the national diet.
Americans are not likely to break up with endless pasta bowls and half-pound burgers overnight. But the relationship has shifted significantly. More than 75 percent of customers say they want smaller portions for less money, according to the 2024 National Restaurant Association report on the industry.
Restaurants sinking under rising food costs are trying to figure out how to sell smaller servings without upsetting value-minded customers. This month, the Portion Balance Coalition, based at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, began a yearlong study to puzzle out the problem. They hope to sign on at least 10 high-volume chains like Panda Express and Chick-fil-A.
Some restaurants have already taken action. In January, Subway introduced a snack-focused menu that includes smaller bites like $3 hot wraps. Burger King’s largest franchisee shrank its 10-piece chicken nugget order to eight. Panera Bread’s You Pick Two — a cup of soup with half a sandwich or half a salad — is among its most popular menu items.
Chip Wade, who in 2022 left a career running Red Lobster’s North America operations to become chief executive of the Union Square Hospitality Group, predicts that the restaurant industry will eventually reconsider oversize portions. “We’re getting ready to get ready,” he said.
Food costs aren’t the only pressure on serving sizes. As much as 40 percent of food served at restaurants never gets eaten, according to a 2020 study on food waste. In an effort to slow climate change, states including California and Massachusetts have restricted how much food can end up in landfills. And millions of people taking GLP-1 drugs are eating much less than they once did.
Then there’s what market researchers call “snackification.” Especially among younger people, traditional meals are being replaced with snacks and small assemblages of food that approximate meals. Millennials and Gen Z-ers in particular are snacking more as a way to manage schedules that vary widely day to day, to explore bolder flavors in a low-risk way and to create more nutritionally sound diets.
On average, U.S. adults describe half the occasions they eat in a day as snacks, according to data from the Hartman Group, a market research company.
For younger diners, value is a much more complex calculus than getting the largest portion for the lowest price, said Shelley Balanko, the group’s senior vice president. They care about whether a price is fair given the quality of the ingredients and cost of labor, and how much their food impacts the environment.
“When it comes to quantity,” she said, “it’s the right size for me or for my needs at the moment.”
Customizing portion sizes should be as easy as it is for a morning coffee or a lunchtime salad, said Dana Gunders, the president of ReFED, the nation’s leading organization fighting food waste and one of the groups working on the Georgetown portion study.
She’d like to see restaurants offer half-bowl options or baby burritos. “I can customize everything about my order except the size,” she said. “People want this choice and they are not getting it.”
Many diners already navigate their way around big portions by ordering kids’ meals, sticking to appetizers or embracing restaurants that offer shareable small plates.
Meal bundles — a collection of dishes sold in family-size portions for a slightly reduced price — have become popular in these inflationary times. At Olive Garden, for example, a lasagna bundle with salad and breadsticks designed to serve four to six people costs about $59. Diners can stretch the food into several meals, or feed more people than the menu suggests.
When Abby Fammartino eats out with her husband and son, they control how much they get by under-ordering. “We may only order two things to share because we know that the portion sizes are high,” she said.
As the director of health and sustainability programs and research at the Culinary Institute of America, Ms. Fammartino is coordinating the yearlong experiment with ReFED and the Portion Balance Coalition, an organization that began in 2017 and collaborates with food manufacturers, restaurant chains, researchers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Among the questions they’re asking: How can restaurants shift diners’ perspectives on appropriate portion sizes? Would it help to change menu descriptions, use smaller plates or add images to show the size of each dish? How about serving fewer French fries but allowing diners to order more for free. Many diners wouldn’t, but it might feel like a good deal — and help the restaurant avoid throwing away uneaten food.
Part of the problem, researchers say, is that most people have no idea what a reasonable amount of food looks like because they have “portion distortion.”
“Once you get used to larger portions, anything that looks like a normal-sized portion seems like you are getting cheated,” said Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University who has researched the link between portion size and obesity. “I think it’s very hard to go back. It feels awful to people.”
In a 2023 experiment with three independent restaurants in Southern California, Kaiser Permanente helped create a “balanced portions” menu that featured portion sizes that nutritionists would consider reasonable. Restaurant dinner portions average about 900 to 1,500 calories, and the balanced-portion dinners are not more than 700 calories. That might include three ounces of chicken, three-quarters of a cup of rice and a couple of cups of vegetables.
The approach proved so popular that two restaurants decided to keep it. One that didn’t want to change its larger portions marketed them as “dinner today, lunch tomorrow.” Two new restaurants have since joined the study.
“What I like about the balanced-portion menu is that I do not have to do any mental work in ordering,” one participant told the researchers. “You’ve done all of the homework.”
Deborah Cohen, the author and research scientist who led the study, likens the battle to shrink portions to the public health campaign to get people to stop smoking, which took years. That required limiting access to cigarettes and underscoring how addictive smoking is.
Most people lack the ability to control how much they eat when they are served too much, Dr. Cohen said.
“We have to go in that direction of changing the environment, not just letting people go at it on their own,” she said. “They are not likely to succeed if everything is stacked against them. It’s like trying to swim in the tsunami.”
But many customers like portion sizes the way they are, said Kevin Hochman, chief executive officer and president of Brinker International, which owns Chili’s Grill & Bar and Maggiano’s Little Italy, a chain he said was built on the concept that “Grandma always wanted you to leave overly stuffed and feeling like you can’t eat any more.”
For every guest who wants the chance to customize a meal, he said, there’s another who doesn’t want to do all that work. For every diner seeking smaller portions, there’s one who wants to splurge on a hearty meal, or get the most for their money.
“There is a truth about American consumers: People want what they want,” he said. “It’s our job to meet guests where they are and not where we think they should be.”
Chipotle Mexican Grill recently learned that portion sizes matter a lot to its customers, and not because they want smaller ones. Reviewing a Chipotle in May, the online food influencer Keith Lee complained that there wasn’t enough chicken in his bowl.
His fans sprang into action, recording workers as they assembled their bowls, and walking out if the servings seemed small. When the company’s chief executive, Brian Niccol, posted a video saying big portions were part of the chain’s ethos, he was widely mocked. He eventually relented and told investors in a call that at least 10 percent of his restaurants were serving portions that were too small.
Jack Goldburg, the popular globe-trotting restaurant influencer behind Jack’s Dining Room, joined the thousands of Chipotle critics. He’s a fan of the restaurants, but he remembers when he could spend $14 or so there and get a feast.
“No one thinks they’re going to walk into Chipotle or Sweetgreen and think, ‘Yeah, this is going to be the best meal I’ve ever had in my life,’” he said. “What you think is, ‘I’m going to spend $15 to $20 and I’m going to get the best bang for my buck.’ But now you’re like, ‘Maybe I could just go cook the same thing and get way more food for a lot less money.’”
Like others, he believes that the era of giant plates of food are over, and that quality matters more than ever.
But smaller portions may still be a tough sell. “If you go and you spend, you know, $20 on an appetizer and it’s a couple cucumbers in a bowl,” he said, “you’re going to be pretty upset.”
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