From scientist’s desk to the school canteen: The potential of living laboratories for designing sustainable school meals in Indonesia
Mara Petruzzelli (Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy), Rico Ihle (Agricultural Economics and Rural Policy Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands & Department of Agricultural Socioeconomics, Universitas Padjadjaran, Bandung, Indonesia) & Matteo Vittuari (Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy).
School meals are seen by the UNESCO, the School Meals Coalition chaired by the World Food Program as well as President Prabowo Subianto’s government as crucial for promoting healthy eating behaviors among children. School meals help therefore advancing the Indonesian food system towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as committed in the global 2030 Agenda (WFP, 2017) and they generate 16 to 35-fold economic returns for each rupiah invested (School Meals Coalition, 2025). The crucial role of schools for achieving food security and better nutrition (SDG2) and reducing food loss and waste (SDG12) has been emphasized by many global actors such as the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact or the Global Child Nutrition Foundation. Hence, the current government of the 8th President of Indonesia has rolled out its MBG program offering free nutritious meals to all Indonesian school children since the beginning of 2025.
Schoolchildren play a vital role as leaders of change in advancing sustainability at local level given that they are living a particularly sensitive period of their growth, in which behaviours are not yet full established and can still be postively influenced (Pastorino et al., 2023). Various scientific analyses have proven that fostering healthy eating habits in schools reduces the risk of diet-related diseases (Bonomo and Schanzenbach, 2024) and addresses childhood dietary inequalities (Bryant et al., 2023) that otherwise might continue into adolescence and adulthood. Piras et al. (2023) also show that establishing positive eating habits and promoting food education leads to children who are better informed of and more conscious about the sustainability of their food.
Given the need for designing of healthy and sustainable school meals in Indonesia to be delivered via President Prabowo Subianto’s MBG program to provide free meals to 60 million schoolchildren, scientific guidance incorporating international experiences on how to establish effective school canteens practices as well as local food preferences will be increasingly required. For this reason, comprehensive practical experiences from improving school canteens worldwide will create a strategic benefit for Indonesia to ensure that the MBG program will reach all its goals.
As many countries are making an effort to provide the best and most sustainable school catering possible, school canteens and the food provisioning channels they are based upon have become an ideal venue for policymakers for implementing healthy eating interventions which help to make the food system more sustainable. These interventions are experimental activities which are designed by scientists or governmental bodies to be carried out by them together with schoolteachers and catering professionals in single or various schools. Usually, they have goal to assess how the eating environment in these canteens can be improved to reduce food waste (Quested, 2019), to find a good balance between healthiness and the costs of the food served or to reach other goals the local communities, regional authorities or the national government find important. Such interventions in school canteens have been designed to measure scientifically on how pupils’ eating habits react to changes in the menu default option (Petruzzelli et al., 2025), the reduction of portion sizes (Qi et al., 2022), the introduction of new food choices (Kokkorou et al., 2025), or an increase of the knowledge given to pupils about the food served (Vermote et al., 2020).
One innovative and inclusive way to gather such experiences and connect them with scientific approaches are living laboratories which are increasingly used in the European Union to create benefits for citizens and local communities. Living laboratories are physical or virtual environments in which research meets practice. This means that groups of citizens which have a concrete stake in a certain question meet each other guided by a scientific approach to co-create solutions for addressing some important challenge (to learn more, see European Network of Living Labs, 2025). Therefore, scientists make an effort to exactly understand preferences and goals of citizens to design their research in a way to help reach these preferences and goals and actually collaborate with these communities to carry out the research together. In the context of school lunches, this could mean to bring together and involve representatives of provincial, regional and local authorities, pupils’ families, local farmers, food traders and processors, teachers, kitchen staff and the school leaderships in order to develop a common understanding on the achievements of the local school catering and the needs for action.
In the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna (which corresponds to the provincial administrative level in Indonesia), for example, the living laboratory Laboratory of Sustainable Catering has been established to define such a space of opinion and experience sharing on the educational, nutritional, environmental, and social benefits school canteens may contribute for the future of the region’s food system. The laboratory is co-led by the regional government and the University of Bologna and brings together education experts, researchers, and policymakers to co-design solutions for understanding and improving the sustainability of school canteens.
Schoolchildren in primary schools in Italy are usually first served a dish made of cereals, after about 10 minutes a second dish made of vegetables or animal protein accompanied by a side dish of vegetables and bread and fruits as shown in Picture 1.
Picture 1: The composition of a typical Italian school lunch
Source: Authors.
Children tend to prefer the first dish and to avoid the vegetables as shown in Picture 2. This generally observable food consumption pattern reduces the healthiness of their lunch intakes and produces every year about 6,000,000 kilograms of vegetable plate waste in all Italian schools. In order to gain objective scientific evidence on whether the order of the lunch courses can be optimized so that schoolchildren are nudged to consume more vegetables so that food waste is substantially reduced or even avoided, the Laboratory of Sustainable Catering has been commissioned by Emilia-Romagna’s government to measure the impact of a dish-reordering intervention on the food consumption of schoolchildren and the amounts of food waste they produce. The regional authorities were looking to obtain objective evidence-based measurements on whether prioritizing the vegetables side dish as a first course would avoid food waste and raise vegetable consumption.
Picture 2: Example of plate waste amounts of various pupils during one school lunch
Source: Authors.
The goal of this research project, which was carried out from July 2022 to March 2023, was to understand if serving vegetables as first dish would be an effective strategy to improve the sustainability of school catering across all primary schools of the region. To gather the insights requested by the policy makers, the research project used the method of a randomized controlled trial , which is the best scientific approach to correctly measure the effects of food-related experiments on humans (Hariton and Locascio, 2018). The intervention changed the dish order by serving the side dish made of vegetables as a first menu item (Petruzzelli et al., 2025).
To exclude the possibility of experiment outcomes being affected by particularities of one or a few schools in specific municipalities or neighborhoods, the experiment involved 760 third grade pupils of eight to nine years from 26 randomly selected schools across the region. Measuring the experiment effects for so many pupils in such a large number of schools for a number of subsequent days ensures that a general effect can indeed be detected because measurement errors are minimized and statistical conclusions indeed measure true and actual effects. Both components of school catering food waste created – as not all food prepared gets completely served to pupils (serving waste) and not all students eat the complete lunch served to them on their plate (plate waste) – have been weighted for each class during and after each daily lunch. This measurement has been done by the researchers, schoolteachers and kitchen staff before and during the five consecutive days when the dish reordering experiment has been implemented in the chosen schools according to a structured scientific data collection protocol (see Picture 3). This robust protocol to evaluate the effect of changing the dish order allowed to conclude that serving vegetables before all other lunch components significantly reduces food waste for some groups of school but increases it for others (Petruzzelli et al., 2025). The regional government learned from this exact and objective scientific analysis that serving vegetables as first dish is not a one-size-fits-all solution, that is, that it leads to an improvement of the sustainability of pupils’ diets at some schools, but not at others. Across all 26 schools which participated in the experiment, no general impact on increasing sustainability of school catering could be found (Petruzzelli et al., 2025). Therefore, the regional government decided not to make the experiment’s dish order the standard dish order in all the region’s schools, but to continue with the traditional dish order.
Picture 3: Separation of plate waste for each lunch course by appointed professionals
Source: Authors.
Such robust and inclusive methods which integrate stakeholders’ knowledge and preferences into scientific research to design policies aimed at improving local living conditions can inspire policy making processes in Indonesia too. From the experiment conducted in Italy by Petruzzelli et al. (2025) Indonesian authorities and professionals can gain multiple concrete insights. Firstly, the authors offer in Supplementary Table A of their article a comprehensive overview of national school lunch serving setups across ten countries and four food cultures. The table makes it possible to understand for each country what is its typical school meal composition, catering service structure, duration and structure of school lunch breaks, and which guidelines define school lunch portion sizes. Such detailed knowledge facilitates the understanding of how other countries implement school meals and which inspirations Indonesia can profit from.
Secondly, Indonesian authorities and scientists can get inspiration of how to set up a participatory intervention for improving children’s food consumption in schools or other purposes. Petruzzelli et al. (2025) outline the methodological roadmap to be followed, from the design of the intervention to its implementation and evaluation. The authors describe how to co-design the intervention with relevant stakeholders, which strategy to use for the selection of the sample, how to collect food waste data and finally how to set a robust empirical approach for making good use of the collected data and draw robust results. Such a transparently described process can be easily transferred and adapted to the Indonesian context, serving as a reference and scientific basis for interventions in the school food domain in order to help the MBG program succeed. Most importantly, guidance is provided on how to conduct a structured stakeholders consultation within the school community for understanding the priorities of schools and designing an appropriate intervention accordingly. Supplementary Table D and Figure B in the article Petruzzelli et al. (2025), which is freely available via the link provided below in the reference list, comprehensively detail the process through which stakeholders were involved starting from the intervention co-design process to the selection of the final intervention.
By involving stakeholders from different professional fields and disciplines, Indonesian policymakers and scientists are inspired to set up similar participatory processes via living laboratories, which enhance the societal ownership and support of their actions by citizens, for speeding up progress on the sustainable transformation of children’s diets and the entire food system. The study used a standardized protocol, which can be obtained from the authors of this article upon request, to guide researchers and policy makers in the collection of food waste data. The protocol details which measurement strategy to be used, and how to categorise the food waste flow. As precise and uniform measurement of food waste quantities – as shown in Pictures 3 and 4 – are key for exactly quantifying the challenge, following this protocol can create a significant added value for Indonesian authorities. Using this standardised protocol allows to draw a nationally representative sample of Indonesia’s school food waste volumes and to compare them in a broader international context. This can be one aspect for accelerating Indonesia’s sustainability achievements and identifying similarities and differences with those of other ASEAN countries or beyond.
Picture 4: Bins for the collection of plate waste for each lunch course in a school canteen
Source: Authors.
Note: On the signs the courses are specified (from left to right): starter, second dish, (vegetable) side-dish, fruit, and bread.
School children, public authorities, scientific researchers and all citizens of Indonesia can substantially profit from the optimal design and effective implementation of policy strategies which are as evidence-based as possible. Living labs such as the one established by Petruzzelli et al. (2025) are an innovative, effective and inclusive approach to advance Indonesia’s sustainability performance. Linking and aligning interests of policymakers to the preferences of citizens and the expertise of scientists will create comprehensive benefits which profit the design of policies which are rooted in and based upon objective scientific measurements of the living reality of Indonesians. This approach can serve to address the political priorities of any governmental level of Indonesia by benefitting from the practical knowledge, experiences and preferences of professional experts and society as well as the methodological support from universities and research institutes.
The publication can be accessed here https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102784
References
Bonomo, T., Schanzenbach, D.W., 2024. Trends in the school lunch program: Changes in selection, nutrition & health. Food Policy 124, 102608. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102608
Bryant, M., Burton, W., O’Kane, N., Woodside, J. V., Ahern, S., Garnett, P., Spence, S., Sharif, A., Rutter, H., Baker, T., Evans, C.E.L., 2023. Understanding school food systems to support the development and implementation of food based policies and interventions. Int. J. Behav. Nutr. Phys. Act. 20, 29. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-023-01432-2
European Network of Living Labs (2025). Global Community of Changemakers – Empower everyone to innovate. Available at: https://enoll.org/. Accessed in April 2025.
Hariton, E., Locascio, J.J., 2018. Randomised controlled trials – the gold standard for effectiveness research. Study design: randomised controlled trials. BJOG Research Methods Guides. https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0528.15199
Kokkorou, M., Spinelli, S., Dinnella, C., Pierguidi, L., Wollgast, J., Maragkoudakis, P., Monteleone, E., 2025. Co-creating innovative and accepted legume-based dishes for school canteens with adolescents in a low socioeconomic area. Food Qual. Prefer. 123, 105343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2024.105343
Pastorino, S., Springmann, M., Backlund, U., Kaljonen, M., Singh, S., Hunter, D., Vargas, M., Milani, P., Bellanca, R., Eustachio Colombo, P., Makowicz Bastos, D., Manjella, A., Wasilwa, L., Wasike, V., Bundy, D., 2023. School meals and food systems: Rethinking the consequences for climate, environment, biodiversity, and food sovereignty. London. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.17037/PUBS.04671492
Petruzzelli, M., Iori, E., Ihle, R., Vittuari, M., 2025. Can changing the meal sequence in school canteens reduce vegetable food waste? A cluster randomized control trial. Food Policy 130, 102784. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102784
Piras, S., Righi, S., Banchelli, F., Giordano, C., Setti, M., 2023. Food waste between environmental education, peers, and family influence. Insights from primary school students in Northern Italy. Journal of Cleaner Production 383, 135461. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.135461
Qi, D., Li, R., Penn, J., Houghtaling, B., Prinyawiwatkul, W., Roe, B.E., 2022. Nudging greater vegetable intake and less food waste: A field experiment. Food Policy 112, 102369. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2022.102369
Quested, T., 2019. Guidance for evaluating interventions preventing household food waste.
School Meals Coalition, 2025. Press Release: Nutritious Meals Program to reach schools today in Indonesia. Available at: https://schoolmealscoalition.org/stories/press-release-nutritious-meals-program-reach-schools-today-indonesia. Accessed in April 2025.
Vermote, M., Nys, J., Versele, V., D’Hondt, E., Deforche, B., Clarys, P., Deliens, T., 2020. The effect of nudges aligned with the renewed Flemish Food Triangle on the purchase of fresh fruits: An on-campus restaurant experiment. Appetite 144, 104479. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2019.104479 WFP, 2017. How School Meals Contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals 8. https://doi.org/https://www.wfp.org/publications/2016-how-school-meals-contribute-sdgs