Real-life experiments in supermarkets to encourage healthy dietary-related behaviours: opportunities, challenges and lessons learned

Abstract

Background: supermarkets are the primary source of food for many people yet their full potential as a setting to encourage healthy dietary-related behaviours remains underutilised. Sharing the experiences from research groups who have worked with supermarket chains to evaluate strategies that promote healthy eating could improve the efficiency of building such relationships and enhance the design quality of future research studies.

Methods: a collective case study approach was used to synthesise experiences of engaging and sustaining research collaborations with national supermarket chains to test the effectiveness of health-focused in-store interventions. The collective narrative covers studies conducted in three high-income countries: Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Results: we have distilled our experiences and lessons learned into six recommendations for conducting high quality public health research with commercial supermarket chains. These include: i) using personal contacts, knowledge of supermarket activities and engaging executive management to establish a partnership and allowing time to build trust; ii) use scientifically robust study designs with appropriate sample size calculations; iii) formalise data exchange arrangements and allocate adequate resource for data extraction and re-categorisation; iv) assess effects at individual/households level where possible; v) design a mixed-methods process evaluation to measure intervention fidelity, dose and unintended consequences; and vi) ensure scientific independence through formal contract agreements.

Conclusions: our collective experiences of working in non-financial partnerships with national supermarket chains could be useful for other research groups looking to develop and implement supermarket studies in an efficient manner. Further evidence from real-life supermarket interventions is necessary to identify sustainable strategies that can improve population diet and maintain necessary commercial outcomes.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Christina Vogel: orcid.org/0000-0002-3897-3786

ORCID for Preeti Dhuria: orcid.org/0000-0003-2803-4424

ORCID for Sarah Crozier: orcid.org/0000-0002-9524-1127

ORCID for Janis Baird: orcid.org/0000-0002-4039-4361

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