Grocery stores are important settings to promote healthier food and beverage choices. The present paper aims at reviewing the effectiveness of different types of in-store interventions and how they impact sales of different product category in real grocery stores. Systematic search was conducted in six databases. In-store interventions were categorized according to the framework by Kraak et al. (2017) into one or more of eight interventions (e.g., place, profile, portion, pricing, promotion, healthy default picks, prompting and proximity). This systematic theme-based review follows the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) data screening and selection. Thirty-six studies were included in the qualitative synthesis and 30 studies were included in the meta-analysis, representing 72 combinations of in-store interventions. The analysis demonstrates that interventions overall had small significant effect size (ES) using Cohen’s d on food purchase behavior (d = 0.17, 95% CI [0.04, 0.09]), with largest ES for pricing (d = 0.21) and targeting fruits and vegetables (d = 0.28). Analysis of ES of in-store interventions show that pricing, and pricing combined with promotion and prompting, effectively impacted purchase behavior. Interventions significantly impacted both sales of healthy and unhealthy products and significantly increased sales of fruits and vegetables, healthy beverage and total volume of healthy products. Results should however be interpreted with some caution, given the relatively low quality of overall evidence and low number of studies and observations for some types of intervention. Further research exploring impact on different in-store interventions and targeting especially unhealthy products are needed.
Background: Food production and consumption contributes to one third of households' environmental impact. The environmental impact of different food categories varies and in general environmental footprint of meat is high than fish and vegetable options. Environmental food labels have been suggested as a means to sway consumption patterns. The purpose of this study is to test if different simple eco-labels in combination with posters can influence consumers to select environmentally friendly food options.
Method:Three different labeling systems were tested on warm dishes in a University cafeteria in Oslo, Norway. The first system was traffic-light labels with three symbols (red, yellow and green), the second system was a single-green label that only labeled the environmentally friendliest dishes, and the third system was a single-red label that only labeled the least environmentally friendly option. Posters were placed in the cafeteria, explaining the labeling systems and the climate impact of different food categories. Outcome measures was sales share of meat, fish and vegetarian dishes. The intervention period was separated in two; the first 20 days (period 1) and 22 last days (period 2) to evaluate if the effects of the labels was different when first introduced and after some months.
Results:The traffic-light labels significantly reduced sales of meat dishes with 9% in the period 1 (p < 0.1) but not in period 2. Sales share of fish or vegetarian dishes were not impacted. Single-green and single-red labeling had no effect on sales share of meat, fish or vegetarian dishes. Posters were present during all interventions.Conclusion: Findings suggests that traffic-light labels in combination with posters can improve the eco-friendliness of customers food choices in a cafeteria setting, at least short-term. Future studies should investigate the long-term effects of simple eco-labels. Additionally, one should study the combined effect of symbols with other changes in the choice architecture.
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