In an initial phase of the EC a very simple handmade poster with the initiative’s name ‘‘Clean dish, clean conscience!” was placed above the static tray slide, at eye level. The action with the purpose of reducing food waste started to raise curiosity among the canteen users. One point in favour was that the canteen users are mostly students and they recognized their colleagues as the ones driving the campaign. However, after three days, the students did not seem to have interpreted the name of the campaign and expressed no interest in reducing food waste. They were then challenged to take action by defining the amount of food they would actually want to consume instead of just accepting the regular portion size. This was encouraged through further poster displays with the result of plate waste during stage one, and other motivating posters shown in Fig. 2. When eating out, consumers lose the sense of ownership or responsibility for the food that is going to waste, attributing issues such as overwhelming portion sizes to be out of their scope of influence (WRAP, 2009). For example, during stage one a large amount of soup was being left in the bowls because the users accepted the soup and the standard portion. To change this behaviour, informative posters stating: ‘‘If you cannot eat all the soup, ask for half!” were placed close to the area where soup is collected (Fig. 2). Similarly, other posters were displayed to encourage students to ask for the portion size to be modified according to their needs or to simply reject a food type they know that they would not eat. These posters stated: ‘‘Ask for the right amount of food and together we can reduce waste!” and were placed in highly visible places. Since in stage one almost 20 portions of intact bread were disposed per day, another simple incentive poster was placed near the bread point stating: ‘‘Did you know? The bread you do not eat goes to garbage!” (Fig. 2).