Sustainability and tradition as implicit cues for promoting low-market-value fish dishes in restaurants

In recent years, European consumers have increasingly concentrated their fish consumption on a few marine species, which have a high monetary value. Unfortunately, the intensive fishing pressure exerted on few species can jeopardize the stability of marine ecosystems and produce a huge amount of discarded fishes. To address this, promoting the consumption of low-commercial-value fish could be a solution to foster responsible and sustainable consumption. As these species are not easy to handle and require time and cooking skills to be prepared, we tested the use of implicit conditioning tools to promote the consumption of low-market-value fish in restaurants. Therefore, a choice experiment was conducted on a sample of 774 Italian consumers. The participants were randomly divided into two information treatments plus a control group. They were presented with a menu containing one option with low-market-value fish species, selecting fish soup as a traditional and recognizable dish, thereby proposing a familiar dish option that can include such species and facilitate consumer acceptance. The low-market-value fish option was accompanied by a small image and a message highlighting its sustainability (first group) or traditionality (second group). The results indicated that the instrument related to traditionality was the only one effective in influencing consumer choices toward the low-market-value fish option, particularly for high-income consumers. Other consumer segments, such as those who care about the environment, were not particularly susceptible to the environmental cue.