Healthy Retail Research Convening

Healthy Eating Research (HER) is commissioning the Center for Science in the Public Interest to produce a report outlining the proceedings of a convening to develop a research agenda for healthy retail. The resulting research agenda and proceedings will be based on a series of literature reviews, white papers, interviews, and convening discussions. In 2010, More

The Impact of NuVal Shelf Nutrition Labels on Food Purchase

Summary shelf nutrition labels are one of a handful of practical strategies that hold the promise of improving nutrition and public health. Researchers used a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the effect of the NuVal shelf label—an interpretive numeric score, now defunct, that rated the overall nutrition of foods from one (least healthful) to 100 (most More

Impact of an Innovative Pricing Manipulation Study on Sales & Purchasing in a Low-Income Urban Community Store

This project will expand an existing study and test different pricing manipulation strategies for both healthy and unhealthy foods and accompanying promotional strategies in a community grocery store. The research team will introduce a series of pricing manipulation strategies on a monthly basis. For each food item, they will identify two healthy and two unhealthy More

Studying the Impact of Financial Incentives at Point of Purchase on Low-Income Consumers’ Purchase of Healthy Food and, Subsequently, on Family Health

To address diet quality disparities in low-income families, policymakers and health experts recommend strategies such as financial incentives to promote consumption of fruits and vegetables (FVs). Real-time incentives for purchasing FV and variable incentives are promising, untested strategies to improve families’ diets and health. The goal of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of More

Developing and Evaluating the Effectiveness of Pictorial Health Warnings on Sugar-Sweetened Beverages to Overcome Language and Literacy Barriers

Childhood obesity is a major public health problem in the U.S. among racial and ethnic minorities, including among the growing Latino population in the U.S. One promising but understudied policy for addressing childhood obesity is requiring health warnings on the front of sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) containers. Pictorial warnings in particular hold promise for overcoming language More

Better for You Foods: A Guide to Evaluating the Quality of Nutrition Standards

Retailers and other organizations currently use a variety of nutrition standards and recommendations to guide consumers towards healthier, “Better for You”, options. This variety can be confusing to consumers. Healthy Eating Research convened a scientific advisory committee to review existing “Better-For-You” nutrition standards, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. The scientific advisory committee developed a More

Best Practices for Using Natural Experiments to Evaluate Retail Food and Beverage Policies and Interventions

This article describes and addresses the challenges researchers face when utilizing natural experimental studies to evaluate changes to the retail food environment. Through the use of case studies, the article describes strategies and approaches for overcoming these challenges. The challenges are divided into categories of: 1) study design and analysis; 2) selection of participants, selection More