A School of Continuous Improvement poster reruns an earlier loaf-storage trial in share-house kitchens, and the University divides every loaf in its larger kitchens three ways.
A replication across fifty-eight share-house kitchens finds the family-kitchen result holds for two adults and no more
Two adults can share a bread bin without it costing the household a slice. By the third, the fridge starts to win, and the University has changed the way it keeps bread to match.
The change follows Same Loaf, Different Heels, a research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement that reruns an earlier storage trial in fifty-eight share-house kitchens. Where the original family-kitchen trial found nothing to choose between the bread bin and the fridge, the replication finds the difference opening with every adult added to the kitchen. Every loaf received into a University kitchen with more than two adult users will now be divided three ways on arrival, between the bin, the fridge and the freezer. The earlier finding stays on the register, annotated with the household size at which it holds.
The first result was a good result, and it has turned out to be a good result about two people. We are fond of it in that form.
— Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints
The work applies a two-period crossover across 696 loaves, moving each kitchen’s bread between the two places in turn and reading the outcome from what reaches the kitchen bin at collection. Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, said the team was glad to be asked about the freezer, “which is a different kitchen entirely, and one we are keen to visit properly.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.a4883f.