COMMUNITY FOOD ENVIRONMENT
ENACT STRATEGY: Store Displays
Encourage food stores to adopt family-friendly policies that promote healthy products and restrict unhealthy marketing
When we shop, our purchases are influenced not only by what’s available and affordable, but also by how products are organized and advertised inside the store. The overall layout of the store affects what we buy. When high-sugar cereals are shelved at children’s eye level, parents are more likely to be pestered into choosing them over healthier breakfast options. When fruit and granola bars, rather than candy and chips, are stocked in the check-out lanes, people are much less likely to make an unhealthy, last-minute impulse buy. Similarly, marketing promotions, displayed throughout the store, impact both children’s and adult’s buying habits. Because many such promotions disproportionately target children, low-income shoppers, and people of color, and because they often advertise unhealthy foods, they are harmful and unfair.
Communities can, however, improve store environments by working with owners and managers to implement family-friendly policies that encourage customers to buy healthy foods.
Characteristics of family-friendly supermarket policies:
• Keep checkout lanes free of candy, gum, or other unhealthy foods.
• Shelve high sugar cereals (and similar products) above children’s eye level.
• Remove advertisements and store displays marketing unhealthy products to children.
• Add colorful store displays highlighting the benefits and tastiness of fruits and vegetables.
• Encourage programs like “Five-a-Day” and “Eat a Rainbow.”
• Provide recipes for quick and healthy meals, using displays in the produce department.
• Set up sampling stations throughout the produce department.
Good Neighbor Program: San Francisco, CA
Literacy for Environmental Justice established the Good Neighbor Program, which incentivizes local merchants to limit in-store advertising of unhealthy products, as well as to increase fruit/vegetable offerings and decrease alcohol/tobacco stocks. In 2007, California adopted Good Neighbor as a statewide model.
Healthy Stores: Providing and Promoting Healthy Food Choices
The Healthy Stores project has been implemented in diverse communities across Canada and the United States, including Baltimore, the White Horse Apache Reservation in Arizona, and Hawaii. Through a series of store-based interventions, Healthy Stores improves store environments by changing food offerings and actively promoting healthy products.
Wegman’s Supermarkets’ “Eat Well Live Well” Program
Wegman’s works to create a healthier shopping environment through its “Eat Well Live Well” program. This includes careful placement of “Food You Feel Good About” banners, which highlight products with no artificial ingredients, as well as the “Keys to Wellness Shopping” labels—color-coded dots that provide at-a-glance nutritional information to consumers.
Guidelines for Responsible Food Marketing to Children
Developed by Center for Science in the Public Interest, these Guidelines are intended for parents, school officials, legislators, and community/health organizations. In addition to more general recommendations, they include specific nutritional standards that should guide the marketing practices of the food and beverage industry. Click here for How to Use the Guidelines.
Good Neighbor Best Practices Guide
Literacy for Environmental Justice established the Good Neighbor Program, which incentivizes local merchants to limit in-store advertising of unhealthy products, as well as to increase fruit/vegetable offerings and decrease alcohol/tobacco stocks. In 2007, California adopted Good Neighbor as a statewide model. Good Neighbor recently created a Best Practices Guide, available for purchase through their website.
Marketing Ideas for Healthy Foods in Remote Community Stores
This resource for rural store owners was developed as part of the Rural Indigenous Stores and Takeaways Project in Australia. It provides specific guidance on how to increase the sale of healthy products in rural grocery stores through the intentional marketing of nutritious foods.
Healthy Corner Store Network
The Healthy Corner Store Network promotes efforts to bring healthier foods into corner stores in low-income and underserved neighborhoods. The Network brings together community members, local government staff, nonprofits, funders, and others across the country to share best practices and lessons learned, and to develop effective approaches to common challenges. Here, you can also access descriptions of the many different organizations participating in the Network.
The Food Trust's Healthy Corner Store Initiative
Founded in 1992, the Philadelphia-based Food Trust works to improve the health of children and adults, promote good nutrition, increase access to nutritious foods, and advocate for better public policy. The Healthy Corner Store Initiative includes environmental change, social marketing, nutrition education in local schools, technical training and assistance with corner stores, and research to reduce the incidence of diet-related disease and obesity in low-income communities.
The Food Magazine
The Food Magazine is published by The Food Commission, an independent organization campaigning for healthier, safer, sustainable food in the United Kingdom. Although no longer active, The Parents Jury, another project of The Food Commission, led a multi-year campaign to remove unhealthy products from supermarket check-out lines, “Chuck Snacks off the Checkout!”
A Corner Store Intervention in a Low-Income Urban Community is Associated with Increased Availability and Sales of Some Healthy Foods **
This study evaluated a pilot intervention to increase the availability and sales of healthier food options in Baltimore corner stores. Findings demonstrated that, when small corner stores in low-income neighborhoods stock and promote healthy foods, customers buy those foods more often.
Song, H.J., Gittelsohn, J., Kim, M., Suratkar, S., Sharma, S., & Anliker, J. A Corner Store Intervention in a Low-Income Urban Community is Associated with Increased Availability and Sales of Some Healthy Foods. Public Health Nutrition 2009; April 30: 1-8.
Apache Healthy Stores Project
The Apache Healthy Stores Project implemented a store-based intervention to promote the purchase and consumption of healthy foods on two rural Native American reservations. A survey of local households found that people living near intervention stores increased their consumption of vegetables and high fiber cereals, while decreasing their consumption of less healthy drinks.
Health Marketing in the Supermarket: Using Prompting, Product Sampling, and Price Reduction to Increase Customer Purchases of Lower-Fat Items **
This study examined the effects of a marketing intervention in a supermarket on customer purchases of lower-fat products. The supermarket intervention consisted of prompting, product sampling, and price reduction (store coupons). Findings suggest that prompting, product sampling, and price reduction can increase customer purchases of some lower-fat products.
Paine-Andrews, A., Francisco, V.T., Fawcett, S.B., Johnston, J., & Coen, S. Health Marketing in the Supermarket: Using Prompting, Product Sampling, and Price Reduction to Increase Customer Purchases of Lower-Fat Items. Health Marketing Quarterly (1996); 14(2): 85-99.
** We can only link to article abstracts.
