A Commentary on the Healthy Community Stores Case Study Project: Implications for Retailers, Policy, and Future Research

In the United States, low-income, underserved rural and urban settings experience poor access to healthy, affordable food. Introducing new food outlets in these locations has shown mixed results for improving healthy food consumption. The Healthy Community Stores Case Study Project (HCSCSP) explored an alternative strategy: supporting mission-driven, locally owned, healthy community food stores to improve More

Balancing Mission and Margins: What Makes Healthy Community Food Stores Successful

Mission-driven, independently-owned community food stores have been identified as a potential solution to improve access to healthy foods, yet to date there is limited information on what factors contribute to these stores’ success and failure. Using a multiple case study approach, this study examined what makes a healthy community food store successful and identified strategies More

Nutrition Evaluation of the Emergency Meals-to-You Program (eMTY)

Over the summer of 2020, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Emergency Meals-to-You (eMTY) program provided meals to rural children in households with lower incomes through home-delivered boxes of shelf-stable food. The program was run by the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty in partnership with Chartwells K12, PepsiCo Food for Good, and McLane More

Food Insecurity and Childhood Obesity: A Systematic Review

Addressing food insecurity while promoting healthy body weights among children is a major public health challenge. Our objective is to examine longitudinal associations between food insecurity and obesity in U.S. children aged 1 to 19 years. Sources for this research include PubMed, CINAHL, and Scopus databases (January 2000 to February 2022). We included English language More

Forms of Community Engagement in Neighborhood Food Retail: Healthy Community Stores Case Study Project

Community engagement is well established as a key to improving public health. Prior food environment research has largely studied community engagement as an intervention component, leaving much unknown about how food retailers may already engage in this work. The purpose of this study was to explore the community engagement activities employed by neighborhood food retailers More

Facilitating the Implementation of the HER Nutrition Guidelines for the Charitable Food System

The overall goal of the proposed analysis is to facilitate the successful implementation of the Healthy Eating Research Nutrition Guidelines for the Charitable Food System through the following four components: (1 Scoring – evaluate all food products provided through the federal food distribution programs (e.g., TEFAP, CSFP, FDPIR) according to the HER nutrition guidelines and More

Policy Approaches to Healthier Food Banking

People who rely on the charitable food system both want and deserve nutritious food and beverages that support their health. Yet a 2018 report by MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger and the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that, on average, 25 percent of food bank distributions remain unhealthy. CSPI conducted research More

Healthier Food Donation Guidelines for Retailers and Distributors

Nutritious donations are more important than ever: 60 million people turned to the charitable food system in 2020. Food banks rely on retail and distributor donations for about 30 percent of inventory, and often receive unwanted unhealthy food, like soda and candy. This resource was developed to help food retailers and distributors donate more nutritious More