Eat Smart! Ontario’s Healthy Restaurant Program: Focus Groups With Non-participating Restaurant Operators

Abstract

Eat Smart! Ontario's Healthy Restaurant Program is a standard provincial health promotion program. Public health units give an award of excellence to restaurants that meet nutrition, food safety, and non-smoking seating standards. The purpose of this study was to determine why some restaurant operators have not applied to participate in the program, and how to get them to apply. Four focus group interviews were conducted with 35 operators who didn't apply to participate. The analysis of responses yielded various themes. The participants' perceived barriers to participation were misunderstandings about how to qualify for the program, lack of time, concern about different non-smoking bylaw requirements, and potential loss of revenue. Their perceived facilitators to participation were convenience of applying to participate, franchise executives' approval to participate, a 100% non-smoking bylaw, flexibility in the assessment of restaurants, the opportunity for positive advertising, alternative payment for food handler training, and customer demand. Program staff can use the findings to develop and use strategies to encourage participation.

Implementing healthy food policies in health services: A qualitative study

“…5,6 However, sustainable, at-scale uptake of these policies has been limited in part because of the current paucity of research identifying factors which drive successful implementation. Within the existing literature, there has been some exploration of the experiences of retailers involved in healthy food interventions, [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] and some research drawing on researchers' own experiences of implementation. 7,8,16,18 However, there is little literature capturing the comprehensive experiences of implementation, across the range of stakeholders involved in designing and implementing the policy.…”

Barriers and facilitators to implementing a healthier food outlet initiative: perspectives from local governments

“…Below we explore our results in the context of other local government delivered initiatives (25,37,38) as well as experiences of other implementors (e.g. researchers) who have partnered with small grocery stores (39) and restaurants (40)(41)(42)(43) .…”

The implementation and effectiveness of outlet‐level healthy food and beverage accreditation schemes: A systematic review

“…Flexibility in the assessment of restaurants, with multiple assessment options (such as phone and face-to-face interviews) 72 Lack of evaluation data 37,38,50 Visibility of positive outcomes and results 47 Customer support for and awareness of scheme…”

“…53 Barriers to scheme implementation were also identified. These included promotional activities or materials being unsuitable for display in some businesses, 20,33,40 poor publicizing of a scheme, 33 a slow process for the ordering and delivering of scheme equipment and materials, 42 and low levels of retailer time and availability, 20,37,38,46,47,72 resources, 37,38,40 or technical skills 32 to implement an accreditation scheme. Further, some schemes were relatively time or resource intensive to implement.…”