Promoting Healthier Food Purchases By Leveraging the Online-Grocery Environment

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Rationale: Online-grocery shopping is predicted to be one of the "hottest" food trends of 2014, as national retailers such as Amazon, as well as start-up companies, venture into the e- commerce grocery sector. Importantly, the online-grocery environment could be uniquely manipulated to promote healthier food purchasing and help with weight control. Since consumers tend to choose items listed first on menus and buffet lines, the order of food products displayed on the grocer's website may impact purchasing. Furthermore, it's possible that in an online-grocery environment, nutrition information could be made more salient to consumers. For example, previous research has demonstrated that label color influences perceptions of the healthfulness of foods. The FDA also recently proposed a redesign of foods' nutrition facts panels, which would highlight calorie content in a larger font. Although implementing this label change on all food labels could take years, e-commerce sites could change the format of the nutritional information they display much more quickly. Objectives: The proposed study intends to nudge consumers to make healthier grocery purchases through three distinct interventions: 1.) Manipulating the order of food items within grocery categories; 2.) Displaying product nutrition information in red or green; and 3.) Presenting calorie information in a larger font size. We propose to examine these concepts in adult consumers using a grocery e-commerce platform servicing socioeconomically and racially diverse communities in the northeastern U.S.

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