Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Oct 31, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 3, 2018 - Nov 17, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 21, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Healthy Stores 2020: Reducing retail merchandising of discretionary food and beverages in remote Indigenous community stores: Study protocol
ABSTRACT
Background:
Discretionary food and beverages (products high in high in saturated fat, added sugars and salt) are detrimental to a healthy diet. Nevertheless, they provide 42% of total energy and account for 53% of food and beverage expenditure for remote living Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, contributing to the excessive burden of chronic disease experienced by this population group.
Objective:
In collaboration with the Arnhem Land Progress Aboriginal Corporation (ALPA; which operates 25 stores in very remote Australia) we will test an intervention to reduce sales of discretionary products, by reducing their merchandising and substituting core products, in remote Australian communities.
Methods:
We will use a community-level randomised controlled pragmatic trial design. Stores randomised to the intervention group will be supported by ALPA to reduce merchandising of four food categories (sugar, sugar sweetened beverages, sweet biscuits and confectionery) that in total provide 64% of total energy from discretionary foods and 87% of total free sugars in very remote community stores. The remaining stores (50% of total) will serve as controls and conduct business as usual. Electronic store sales data will be collected at baseline, 12-weeks intervention and 24-weeks post intervention to objectively assess the primary outcome of percent change in purchases of free sugars (g/MJ) and secondary business- and diet-related outcomes. Critical to ensuring translation to improved store policies and healthier diets in remote Indigenous Australia we will conduct i) an in-depth implementation evaluation to assess fidelity; ii) a customer intercept survey to investigate the relationship between customer characteristics and discretionary food purchasing; and iii) a qualitative study to identify policy supports for scale-up of health enabling policy action in stores.
Results:
No results given as it is a protocol paper
Conclusions:
Novel pragmatic research approaches are needed to inform policy for healthy retail food environments. This research will greatly advance our understanding of how the retail food environment can be used to improve population level diet in the remote Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander context and retail settings globally. Clinical Trial: ACTRN 12618001588280
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.