A Way For Grocers To Sell Healthy Produce Without Increasing Shopper Budgets

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How can shoppers be more influenced to buy more fruits and vegetables and stores still benefit economically?

A study from researchers at three universities explains that all a store needs are a bit of creative public health focused marketing materials.

The study proved that public health and economic sustainability can work together to help stores and shoppers alike through healthy marketing practices.

Providing easy-to-understand placards that are placed in the shoppers’ basket within the shopping cart, bilingual messages were used in shopping carts for shoppers in El Paso and Southern New Mexico to see and be encouraged to buy popular cultural fruits and vegetables.

The message on the eight by eleven-inch placards was provided to encourage shoppers that most people in the store, at a minimum, choose five produce items including fruits and vegetables when shopping.

The control and intervention stores were owned by the same company and in zip codes with majority Latino demographics (94.5% and 96.2% Latino).

In order to help prevent unhealthy marketing and promote healthy food marketing, stores must see the benefit. Take action in showing your grocer the benefit of healthier marketing now. Sign our petition to tell grocers to mark the way to fruits and vegetables!

The baseline, studied for over two weeks for over 970,00 individual store transactions were aggregated by day before the placards were placed in selected stores to help researchers understand the impact of the marketing materials. Stores in the study were asked to report sales of all produce for the study testing period.

Fortunately for the shoppers, and stores alike, sales were higher in fresh produce spending and shoppers total spending did not increase but shoppers total expenditures including more spending on produce.

Research shows how healthier marketing practices like these can not only help consumers health in buying more nutritious foods like fruits and vegetables but also help businesses overall bottom line all while promoting health.

This study was published in Preventive Medicine Reports, to read more about this study, click here.