Food Well-Being in the Higher Education Sector: How to Leverage Design Thinking to Create Healthy and Pleasurable Food Experiences Among College Students

Higher education is an important and unique sector to examine food well-being, defined as an integrative understanding of the psychological, physical, emotional, and social relationships individuals have with food (Block et al. 2011). Transitioning into adulthood and living away from home for the first time, students demonstrate inadequate food literacy (Abraham et al. 2018; Kang et al. 2014; Malan et al. 2020; Tam et al. 2017; Wilson et al. 2017). Food availability is often limited to on-campus institutional dining services, fast-food restaurants, and vending machines, with little access to grocery stores (Caruso et al. 2014; Dhillon et al. 2019; Horacek et al. 2013; Lugosi 2019). Promotions for junk food and beverages, such as pizza, burgers, and sugar-sweetened sodas, dominate marketing efforts aimed at this demographic (Bragg et al. 2018; Buchanan et al. 2018; Jayanetti et al. 2018), though calorie concerns, especially among female students, guide many food decisions, often at the expense of pleasurable and social food experiences (Rozin et al. 2003; So et al. 2012; Zein et al. 2016). Meanwhile, university food policies, such as mandatory meal plans, can be costly, confusing, and wasteful (Ellison et al. 2019; Laterman 2019; Pappano 2016). As a microcosm of universal food experiences, student food well-being experiences can inform innovation in all food sectors.