Food and Brand Lab

The Food and Brand Lab is a non-profit research facility at Cornell University, led by Brian Wansink, which focuses on why people buy and eat the foods they do in the quantities they do.

The findings of the lab are widely published in medical, marketing, nutrition, and psychology journals. They have also been summarized in the best-selling book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (2006) and in Marketing Nutrition (2005), and they have been widely reported in the popular press.

The validity of the lab's research has been called into question, with a 2017 investigation discovering "150 errors in just four of [its] papers, strong signs of major problems in the lab’s other research, and a spate of questions about the quality of the work that goes on there," as summarized by New York Magazine.

The Food and Brand Lab—originally known as the "Brand Lab"—was first established by Brian Wansink while he was a marketing professor at Dartmouth College (1990-1994) and focused on individual food choices. The Lab was then transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1995-1997), where its findings began to be noticed by major media outlets. The Wall Street Journal helped raise the Lab's profile when it reported the findings of a series of studies on how package size influences how much food people consume on its front page. The finding that large packages can lead consumers to eat an average of 23% more food than an unconstrained smaller package provided systematic empirical evidence as to how one's immediate environment can bias them to unknowingly overeating. As the first major article on how an implied portion size influences intake and calorie consumption, it helped launch the introduction of mini-size packaging, including the popular, premium-priced 100-calorie packs.

As the Lab began focusing more and more on consumer welfare and nutrition, Wansink moved the Lab to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was hired as a joint professor of Nutritional Science, Marketing, and Agricultural and Consumer Science. At this time, the newly christened Food and Brand Lab was formally institutionalized, and it broadened its focus to study the environmental factors that unknowingly influenced what a person eats and how much they eat.

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Wikipedia