Alcohol expenditure in grocery stores and their associations with tobacco and food expenditures

Abstract

Background Alcohol consumption is a significant cause of disease, death and social harm, and it clusters with smoking tobacco and an unhealthy diet. Using automatically registered retail data for research purposes is a novel approach, which is not subject to underreporting bias. Based on loyalty card data (LoCard) obtained by a major Finnish retailer holding a market share of 47%, we examined alcohol expenditure and their associations with food and tobacco expenditures. Methods The data consisted of 1,527,217 shopping events in 2016 among 13,274 loyalty card holders from southern Finland. A K -means cluster analysis was applied to group the shopping baskets according to their content of alcoholic beverages. The differences in the absolute and relative means of food and tobacco between the clusters were tested by linear mixed models with the loyalty card holder as the random factor. Results By far, the most common basket type contained no alcoholic beverages, followed by baskets containing a small number of beers or ciders. The expenditure on food increased along with the expenditure on alcoholic beverages. The foods most consistently associated with alcohol purchases were sausages, soft drinks and snacks. The expenditure on cigarettes relative to total basket price peaked in the mid-price alcohol baskets. Conclusion Clustering of unhealthy choices occurred on the level of individual shopping events. People who bought many alcoholic beverages did not trim their food budget. Automatically registered purchase data provide valuable insight into the health behaviours of individuals and the population. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-019-7096-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Grocery purchase data in the study of alcohol use – A validity study

“…Participation rate was low and a possible source of selection bias. The participants were unaware of their purchase history use at the time of data collection (Uusitalo et al, 2019). Lacking a 'golden standard', only relative validity could be studied.…”

Dietary and lifestyle habits of drinkers with preference for alcoholic beverage: does it really matter for public health? A review of the evidence

“…Other studies have also found that shopping baskets with beer as the dominant alcoholic beverage contained more fresh pork, beef, pastries and pickled cucumbers and beetroot than baskets containing cider (Uusitalo et al, 2019).…”

“…In the ecological studies, the observations had been made on supermarket transactions and shopping events/purchases, rather than on individuals (Berger et al, 2020;Gell and Meier, 2012;Hansel et al, 2015;Johansen et al, 2006;Uusitalo et al, 2019). In the cross-sectional studies, the size of the studied population varied between 423 (Herbeth et al, 2012) and 48,763 (Tjønneland et al, 1999), with an age range of > 18 years old (Ferreira-Pêgo et al, 2017) to 85 years old (González-Rubio et al, 2016), and they had been conducted in the following countries between 1997 and 2020: Spain (Alcácera et al, 2008;Carmona-Torre et al, 2008;Ferreira-Pêgo et al, 2017;González-Rubio et al, 2016;Sánchez-Villegas et al, 2009;Scholz et al, 2016;Valencia-Martín et al, 2011), Italy (Chatenoud et al, 2000), France (Hansel et al, 2015;Herbeth et al, 2012;Rouillier et al, 2004;Ruidavets et al, 2004), the Netherlands (Sluik et al, 2014;Sluik et al, 2016b;Sluik et al, 2016c), Denmark (Johansen et al, 2006;Tjønneland et al, 1999), Finland (Männistö et al, 1997;Uusitalo et al, 2019), Belgium (Mullie and Clarys, 2015), the United Kingdom (Berger et al, 2020;Gell and Meier, 2012), and the United States (Barefoot et al, 2002;Forshee and Storey, 2006;McCann et al, 2003;…”

“…Meanwhile, other studies were based on quality of life, using for their assessment the Mediterranean diet adherence score and physical activity habits (González-Rubio et al, 2016), or diet and lifestyle (Barefoot et al, 2002;Ferreira-Pêgo et al, 2017;McCann et al, 2003;Mullie and Clarys, 2015;Paschall and Lipton, 2005;Ruidavets et al, 2004). All five of the ecological studies used expenditures/purchases on food/beverage items (Berger et al, 2020;Gell and Meier, 2012;Hansel et al, 2015;Johansen et al, 2006) and food and tobacco expenditures (Uusitalo et al, 2019).…”

Public Attitudes Towards Sharing Loyalty Card Data for Academic Health Research: a Qualitative Study

“…Currently, there is very limited research on using loyalty card data to assess individual and population health. However, a selection of studies shows the potential of loyalty card data for health research [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Davies et al [5] used loyalty card data to show a positive correlation between changes in air quality and purchases of cough and cold medication, hay-fever, and pain relief using data of 10 million customers from a major UK supermarket.…”