Pricing Strategy to Promote Fruit and Vegetable Purchase in High School Cafeterias
Section snippets
Methods
Two high schools participated in the study. The first school, located in an urban setting, had a socioeconomically, racially, and ethnically diverse student body (N=1,431 students; 43% were of nonwhite ethnicity and 29% received free or reduced-price lunches; about 237 students, or 16% of the students per day, on average, purchased the meal pattern lunch, ie, the standard school lunch, in the school cafeteria). The second school, located in a suburban setting, had a middle-income, primarily
Results and Discussion
Table shows average weekly sales of fruit, packets of carrots, and salads by period for the combined data from the schools. Fruit sales increased by about fourfold during the low-price period, from an average weekly total of 14.4 to 63.3 pieces of fruit (P<.0006). Carrot sales increased by about twofold, from an average weekly total of 35.6 packets to 77.6 packets per week (P<.021). There were no significant intervention effects on sales of salads (P<.85). No significant period changes in the
Applications
These results have implications for public health policies aimed to promote the adoption of healthful diets among adolescent youth. Adolescents can be encouraged to select fruit and vegetables when the prices of these items are reduced, in contrast to many nutrition education programs in which effects on behavior are less clear. In our study, even without a supporting nutrition education program, lower prices produced large increases in the sales of fruit and carrots. This occurred without
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2023, Food Quality and PreferenceHow changes in menu quality associate with subsequent expenditure on (un)healthy foods and beverages in school cafeterias: A three-year longitudinal study
2021, Preventive MedicineCitation Excerpt :Precisely, we averaged expenditure per student (winsorized at the 99.5% level), and then averaged it again at the school-month level. Although we measured purchases rather than actual consumption, the former has shown to serve as a fairly reliable proxy (Ferreira et al., 2019; French et al., 1997). Following recent suggestions for the use of absolute product availability (Pechey et al., 2020), we calculated menu quality at the school-month level as the sum of products available per nutritional value (high, moderate, and low).
Effect of price and information on the food choices of women university students in Saudi Arabia: An experimental study
2018, AppetiteCitation Excerpt :Simulated market settings are used because of the practical problems of organising real market experiments. Research in the natural environment has, however, shown purchases of healthier foods responsive to price subsidies in schools (French & Stables, 2003; French et al., 1997, 2001), restaurants and cafeterias (Cinciripini, 1984; Horgen & Brownell, 2002; Jeffery, French, Raether, & Baxter, 1994), supermarkets (Ni Mhurchu, Blakely, Jiang, Eyles, & Rodgers, 2010), and a computerized retail environment (Waterlander et al., 2012). A potential advantage of laboratory experiments is that factors such as hunger levels and dietary restraint tendencies of participants can be controlled for in the analysis.
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2017, AppetiteCitation Excerpt :Findings on the relevance of prices for children's food choice show that children react to prices and that price adjustments can induce unexpected substitution effects that are influenced by children's budgets. With respect to the purchase of EDNP products, the availability of attractive alternatives seems to be of greater relevance for children's food choices than price (e.g., Brown & Tammineni, 2009; Epstein, Dearing, Handley, Roemmich, & Paluch, 2006a, 2006b; French et al., 2001, 1997; Heard, Harris, Liu, Schwartz, & Li, 2016; Kocken et al., 2012). Overall, the literature on children's price responsiveness and brand awareness is scarce.