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 For the study, researchers experimented with 28 food and beverage
machines on a university campus for five months. They tested out
three options alone or in different combinations: restocking
machines with healthy options; discounts for nutritious choices; and
signs touting advantages like less sugar or fewer calories.
Just cutting the price of healthier items by 25 percent didn’t sway
consumers. Both unit sales and revenue fell compared to the same
five-month period in the previous year.
“We were surprised that reduced cost was not a driver for people to
select the healthier snacks and beverages,” said senior study author
Jeannette Ickovics, a public health researcher at Yale University in
New Haven, Connecticut.
Researchers had expected each of the three options to independently
inspire healthier food and beverage selections, Ickovics and
colleagues note in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and
Dietetics.
They also hypothesized that the combination of all three
interventions - restocking, discounts and signs - would have the
greatest influence on consumers.
What they found instead was that the picture looked different for
snacks than for beverages, and that restocking and promotional signs
helped more than price.
In snack machines, adding healthier items and discounting these
products was associated with sales of 460 more units during the
study period than the same period a year earlier. This combination
also resulted in increased revenue of $1,039.
With beverage machines, restocking with healthier options and
posting signs was associated with increased sales of 204 units. In
beverage machines that discounted healthy choices in addition to
doing these two other things, sales only increased by 66 units over
the previous year.
Before the experiment, the best-selling snacks were Twix, Snickers,
MandM Peanuts, Doritos Nacho Cheese and Planters Nuts and Chocolate
Trail Mix - none meet the “FitPick” nutrition standards laid out by
the National Automatic Merchandising Association. These standards,
for example, require snacks to be no more than 250 calories with no
more than 20 grams of sugar and 10 grams of fat.
During the study, all of the top sellers met these nutrition
standards: Whole Grain Pop-Tarts Cinnamon, Sun Chips, Doritos
Reduced Fat Nacho Cheese, Snyder’s Honey Mustard Pretzels and Lay’s
Oven Baked Barbecue Flavored Potato Crisps.
All the top-selling beverages before the experiment were sodas: Diet
Coke, Coke and Coke Zero. During the study, these remained best
sellers but Dasani water also made the list.
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“Sometimes all we need is a little ‘nudge’ with some promotional
signs reminding us to make the healthier choice - products lower in
sugar, salt and fat,” Ickovics said by email.
Limitations of the study include its small size and the possibility
that at least some of the shifts in vending machine purchases might
be due to the novelty of new items and not a sustained effort by
consumers to buy healthier things, the authors note.
Previous research has shown price manipulations can impact people’s
food choices, including what they buy from vending machines, noted
Myles Faith, an education researcher at the University of Buffalo in
New York.
In the current study, it’s possible signs provided an “environmental
nudge” to buy better things than merely stocking healthy snacks
could accomplish on its own, Faith, who wasn’t involved in the
study, said by email.
“People often approach vending machines in a rush and pressed to
make a selection without much thinking, almost in autopilot,” Faith
added. “However, as this study shows, there can be a range of
healthier selections in some vending machines if one slows down to
look carefully.”
Signs can help with that.
“There were no nutrition lectures, podcasts, or quizzes in this
present study, just simple signs,” Faith said. “The simplicity of
the signs is the beauty.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2lHjwFi Journal of the Academy of Nutrition
and Dietetics, online February 4, 2017.
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