It remains unclear whether the decision to cook with both polluting and cleaner-burning fuels (‘fuel stacking’) serves as a transition phase towards the full adoption of clean-cooking practices, or whether stacking allows households to enhance fuel security and choose from a variety of cooking technologies and processes. This paper offers a unique contribution to the debate by positioning fuel stacking as the central research question in the exploration of existing household survey data. This research analyses the World Bank’s Multi-Tier Framework survey data concerning energy access and cooking practices in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Zambia. Its novel approach uses fuel expenditure data to group urban households according to the intensity of biomass consumption (wood, charcoal) relative to modern fuel consumption (electricity, gas). The research explores how different fuel-stacking contexts are associated with factors related to household finances, composition, experiences of electricity, and attitudes towards modern fuels. This study shows the diversity of characteristics and behaviours associated with fuel stacking in urban contexts, thus demonstrating the need for fuel stacking to feature prominently in future data collection activities. The paper ends with five key recommendations for further research into fuel stacking and its role in clean-cooking transitions.

The Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS) programme has generated data on the amount of energy required to cook meals using different fuels and cooking devices. Fuel stacking is commonplace, especially among households with access to modern fuels. Experience shows that people tend to use modern fuels for quick tasks, such as preparing a cup of tea, but prefer to use biomass fuels for foods that take longer to cook. Therefore, changes in the choice of foods in the household menu have the potential to affect the transition to modern fuels. This paper discusses the potential of innovative and emerging aspects of food systems in low-income countries to impact on households. It starts by looking at the processing of indigenous crops to create convenient and nutritious food products. This leads to an overview of the rapid growth of the food processing industry and future opportunities. Consuming food that has been prepared outside of the home is also a common and rapidly growing practice, which is likely to be driven (and disrupted) by technological innovation. Cooking energy considerations depend largely on fuel stacking behaviours, and the paper argues that modern food systems have the potential to reduce energy consumption in the kitchen, and to play a role in displacing traditional biomass fuels with modern fuels.