This is a short presentation of the results of a research project investigating how service employees appearance influences the healthiness of food choice made by customers. We find that the overweight waitress has no effect and the waitress with an unhealthy lifestyle triggers attention towards unhealthy food.

1. Does Service Employees’ Appearance
Affect the Healthiness of Food Choices?
Huneke, T./Benoit, S./Shams, P./Gustafsson, A., (2015), Does Service
Employees’ Appearance Affect the Healthiness of Food Choice?, Psychology
and Marketing, 32 (1), 96-106.

2. Can the look of a waitress effect customers attention to
certain type of food?
Healthy option
Unhealthy
option
Why would it? The logic of social
comparison theory:
1. Decision making is influenced by people
comparing themselves to others and to what they
consider as “normal”.
2. Often behavior is contagious and people sticking
out from this norm make others also depart from
it, because they trigger assimilation behavior.
3. Research Question: Can a healthy versus
unhealthy waitresses trigger consumers to be
attracted to certain healthy or unhealthy meal
alternatives?
Source: Huneke, T./Benoit, S./Shams, P./Gustafsson, A., (2015), Does Service Employees’
Appearance Affect the Healthiness of Food Choice?, Psychology and Marketing, 32 (1), 96-106.

3. Experimental setup
 56kg
 171cm tall
 BMI 19.2
(healthy)
 Weight same as healthy person
 Dress of hedonist lifestyle
 Visible tattoo
 Paler skin
 Shadows under eyes
 85kg (wearing a
“fat suit”)
 171cm tall
 BMI 29.1
(overweight)
Waitress with
unhealthy lifestyle
Healthy
waitress
Overweight
waitress
Source: Huneke, T./Benoit, S./Shams, P./Gustafsson, A., (2015), Does Service Employees’
Appearance Affect the Healthiness of Food Choice?, Psychology and Marketing, 32 (1), 96-106.
Healthy option
Unhealthy
option
Experiment: Participants were served
by a waitress in three different health
appearance and then provided menus
with healthy and unhealthy meal
options.
Using eye-tracking equipment, researchers
looked at 2 variables capturing the attention
to the food choices:
 Total observation duration (TOD):
Represents the visual measure of the time
a person spends considering different
options (-> level of interest)
 Time to first observation (TTFO): Reflects
the order of visual impact between
different areas of interest, expressed in
time (-> being instinctively drawn
towards)

4. Results: Unhealthy lifestyle in others triggers attention to
unhealthy food choices
Source: Huneke, T./Benoit, S./Shams, P./Gustafsson, A., (2015), Does Service Employees’
Appearance Affect the Healthiness of Food Choice?, Psychology and Marketing, 32 (1), 96-106.
2
triggered
triggered
triggered
1 3
If food service companies want to support
their customers in healthy consumption
waitresses should not openly show an
unhealthy lifestyle.
What does that mean for food service companies?
Waitress with
unhealthy lifestyle
Healthy
waitress
Overweight
waitress
Unhealthy
option
Healthy option
Healthy option