The approach

The theory underneath.

The food environment decides far more than willpower does. It was engineered by professionals and tested at scale to work on everyone — so the answer is not asking your people to try harder, it is redesigning the environment they already eat in. Make the invisible visible, then change it.

That theory has a name — Mela, developed by Nutrimelab to decode the layers underneath every food choice: the cues around us, the habits we stopped noticing, the feelings food manages, the culture we inherited, and the biology underneath it all. bfoody is Mela built into software, pointed at the one room where your people eat a thousand working meals a year: the canteen. Fix the environment, and never blame the person standing in it.

The scientific ground it stands on

Cues beat intentions. A Cochrane review of 61 studies and 6,711 people found larger portions and packages make people eat more — regardless of weight, hunger, or how hard they consciously tried to hold back.Hollands et al., 2015 · Cochrane

The food environment does the overeating. In a locked metabolic ward, adults ate ~500 calories a day more on an ultra-processed diet matched for nutrients — and did not notice.Hall et al., 2019

Habits stop consulting you. Once a routine is anchored to a context, the context fires the routine — which is why knowing better so rarely arrives in time.Wood & Neal, 2007

Moving food moves a country. When Britain restricted where high-fat, -sugar and -salt products could sit in shops, roughly two million fewer of those items sold per day.UK HFSS placement regulations, 2022

Menu nudges work. The mechanism bfoody automates produced a 6–15% calorie reduction in independent trials.Behavioural Insights Team / Nesta · p<0.001

Honesty, as always: each layer stands on peer-reviewed ground; the integrated model is ours and has not yet been tested as a whole. That is exactly what the pilot's A/B framework exists to do.

→See the pilot programme →Explore the evidence