Does a semiautomated, personalized, healthy food incentive intervention improve grocery purchase dietary quality and percentage spending in targeted food groups? That is the question Associate Professor of Marketing, Stephen Atlas and colleagues* from around the country set out to answer in the research paper, Effect of Personalized Incentives on Dietary Quality of Groceries Purchased: A Randomized Crossover Trial.
The group of researchers set out to test whether a healthy food incentive intervention using an algorithm incorporating customer preferences, purchase history, and baseline diet quality could improve grocery purchase dietary quality and spending on healthy foods. During a 9-month randomized clinical crossover trial (AB–BA) with a 2- to 4-week washout period between 3-month intervention periods, 224 participants received personalized weekly coupons with nutrition education during the intervention period (A) and occasional generic coupons with nutrition education during the control period (B).
The trial results demonstrated that the intervention led to a small but significant improvement in grocery purchase quality through increased purchase of foods targeted by the intervention. Furthermore, participants’ descriptively healthier dairy and refined grains purchases indicate that categories beyond produce are responsive to price changes.
Read More*Maya Vadiveloo, PhD, RD; Xintong Guan, MS; Haley W. Parker, MS, RD; Elie Perraud, BS, MS; Ashley Buchanan, DrPH; Stephen Atlas, PhD; Anne N. Thorndike, MD, MPH