In this LAB note
Question · Hypothesis · Method · Results · What Failed · What We Learned · What Changed at MOMS
Question
Does giving people more recipe options make personalization feel more useful, or does it create decision fatigue that works against the goal of getting someone to a shake they'll actually order again?
Hypothesis
We hypothesized that a simplified recommendation, one clearly labeled best match with a small number of alternates, would outperform a wide menu of options, even though a wide menu looks more "personalized" on the surface.
Method
The foundational research here is Iyengar and Lepper's well-known 2000 "jam study" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), which found that shoppers presented with 24 jam options were less likely to make a purchase than shoppers presented with just 6, more choice reduced action, not just satisfaction. More recent work has extended this into food specifically: a 2025 narrative review on decision fatigue and food choices found that repeated or effortful decision-making depletes the mental energy people bring to healthy choices, and a 2022 study found that parents under high stress and decision fatigue found it measurably harder to sustain healthy food behaviors like cooking from scratch. We tested this directly in our own quiz-to-shake recommendation flow with an internal A/B test: one version presented 12 recipe options ranked by fit after the quiz; the other presented one clearly labeled "best match" plus two labeled alternates, each with a one-line reason. We tracked average decision time, abandonment rate, and 7-day repeat-order rate for each group.
Results
The 12-option version had an average decision time of 94 seconds and a 22% abandonment rate, people left the flow without ordering. The simplified, one-best-match-plus-two-alternates version cut decision time to 31 seconds and abandonment to 6%. Most notably, the simplified group showed a 34% higher 7-day repeat-order rate, suggesting the effect wasn't just about getting through checkout faster, people who chose from a simplified set were more satisfied with what they picked afterward.
What Failed
We also tested a heavily "smart"-branded version with 20-plus individual customization toggles under the theory that maximum personalization would be maximum value. In practice, testers described it as "homework," and it had the highest abandonment rate of any version we tried.
What We Learned
Personalization isn't the same thing as maximizing options. What actually reads as personal to people is having their specific situation reduced to a small number of confident, well-justified recommendations, not being handed a long menu and asked to do the interpretive work themselves.
What Changed at MOMS
Our quiz-to-shake flow now leads with one clearly labeled best match and a stated reason, with a small number of labeled alternates rather than a full ranked list.
References
1. Iyengar SS, Lepper MR. When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000;79(6):995-1006. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995 2. The Effect of Decision Fatigue on Food Choices: A Narrative Review. Nutrients (MDPI), 2025.
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