Food and beverage manufacturers pay retailers trade promotion fees to influence stores’ layout, product mix, and displays. The result is that unhealthy products are prominent, prevalent, and priced to move.

Instead, imagine finding fresh and healthy options placed and promoted throughout stores. The resources below can help you improve the food and beverage options in stores in your community.

Make the Case

Reports

• Developing a National Research Agenda to Support Healthy Food Retail accompanied by a special issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, outlines a national research agenda on promoting healthy food in the retail environment.
• Scroll and Shop: Food Marketing Migrates Online demonstrates how food and beverage marketing on retailers' online grocery platforms largely undermines consumer's health.
• Rigged: Supermarket Shelves for Sale uncovers the backroom deals between food manufacturers and retailers that influence supermarket offerings and limit consumer choice. For the executive summary, click here.
• Temptation at Checkout: The Food Industry’s Sneaky Strategy for Selling More reveals how checkout is designed to prompt impulse purchases. For the executive summary, click here.
• Sugar Overload: Retail Checkout Promotes Obesity examines the prevalence and healthfulness of foods and beverages in checkout aisles at chain retailers. For a one-page summary, click here.

Fact Sheets and Case Studies

• How Grocery Store Agreements Impact Public Health demonstrates the impact of manufacturers’ trade promotion fees on public health.
• In-Store Marketing Induces Impulse Buys details how in-store marketing drives unhealthy product purchases.
• The Rise of Dollar Stores: How the Proliferation of Discount Stores May Limit Healthy Food Access describes the public health implications of dollar stores and offers strategies communities can use to increase healthy food access.
• Why Healthy Checkout? makes an evidence-based case for why food stores should rethink checkout.
• Consumer Perceptions of Retail Checkout shares results from a national poll that found that shoppers want supermarkets to do more to support their health and to implement healthy checkout.
• The Nagging Question demonstrates the impact of children's pester power on parent's food choices in the grocery store.
• U.K. Retailers Rethink Checkout describes how consumer advocacy across the pond prompted nine retailers—comprising 90% of the U.K.'s food retail market—to make checkout pledges that support healthier eating.
   

Create a Policy

• Healthy Food Retail: Creating and Enforcing a Policy describes policy approaches, community engagement considerations, and enforcement mechanisms for developing a healthy food retail policy in your community.
• NANA Model Nutrition Standards for Checkout, which includes a list of snack, entrée, and beverage options that meet these standards.
• ChangeLab Solutions’ Model Healthy Checkout Aisle Ordinance is designed for municipalities, but states and boards of health can adapt the resource.

If you are a retailer, health department, or advocate and would like technical assistance with introducing and implementing healthy retail policies in your community, please contact policy@cspinet.org.

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