Changing people’s eating habits is a particularly difficult endeavor, even for the most seasoned public health practitioner. However, a recent study found that low-cost interventions, such as in-store promotions and labeling, can boost the sale of nutritious foods.
The study, which was published online in October in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, evaluated the impact of a store-based intervention known as Eat Right-Live Well! Developed by public health and business researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Eat Right-Live Well! was implemented in 2012 in a supermarket located in a low-income neighborhood of Baltimore and consisted of six main components: increased stocking of healthy foods, shelf labels and signage that promote healthier foods, taste testing, price reduction advertisements in store circulars, store staff training and community outreach events.
To examine the impact of Eat Right-Live Well!, researchers analyzed sales data both before and after the intervention and compared the numbers to sales data from a supermarket that had not participated in the intervention.
In the intervention store, researchers found a 28 percent increase in the sale of “high-fidelity” foods, which were defined as products that were accompanied with shelf labeling that identified their healthy qualities more than 75 percent of the time. In comparison, the study found just a 6 percent sales increase in similar foods in the non-intervention store.
Also during the study period, the intervention store experienced just a 1.7 percent increase in sales of low-fidelity foods, such as grains and dairy. While shelf labeling seemed to have made a difference, the study found that taste-testing events to promote healthier choices did not increase sales. Still, the intervention store experienced a smaller decrease in the sale of taste-tested healthy foods than the non-intervention store.
Overall, the study found that during the years prior to Eat Right-Live Well!, the intervention store had experienced a decrease in sales of healthy promoted items — specifically, 14,555 fewer items were sold between 2010 and 2011. However, between 2011 and the 2012 intervention period, purchases of such foods increased by more than 11,000 sales. Researchers also found that sales of fruits and vegetables remained relatively stable in the intervention store both before and after the healthy eating promotion, whereas fruit and vegetable sales declined during the same time period in the non-intervention store.
Study co-author Kevin Frick, PhD, MA, a professor and vice dean for education at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, said a key to gaining buy-in for such an intervention and its eventual success is convincing storeowners that promoting healthy foods is good for their bottom lines.
“It’s really about working with storeowners who want to do good and help their community, but they don’t want to lose money,” Frick told The Nation’s Health. “We found that there really was an increase — or least a smaller decrease — in sales (of high-fidelity foods) and that’s something that really speaks to business owners.”
The study noted that while the impact of Eat Right-Live Well! speaks to the potential success of similar interventions in other low-income neighborhoods, which often suffer from a lack of accessible and affordable healthy grocery items, such efforts do come with a number of challenges, such as providing employee training. However, study co-author Pamela Surkan, PhD, ScD, an assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said local policymakers as well as public health practitioners can play a role in overcoming such barriers.
For example, she said, cities or districts could offer financial incentives for retailers who participate in health education efforts, while public health workers could offer storeowners classification guidelines to help them in identifying and labeling healthy options.
“To the extent that we need to make structural changes to get at behavior change, working at the level of supermarkets is an important aspect,” Surkan told The Nation’s Health. “Of course, no one action will solve this problem. But this is one way to help.”
For more information on the study, visit http://www.jneb.org/article/S1499-4046%2815%2900670-3/fulltext.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
