Purpose: Marketing tactics used in supermarket settings may be an important contributing factor to dietary behaviour. Price promotions are a common marketing tactic used in supermarkets and often promote unhealthy options. Governments in Scotland and the UK have proposed policy restrictions on price promotions of unhealthy food and beverages, but little is known about the likely industry response to policy action in this area. The aim of this explorative study is to understand how potential policy actions related to food and beverage price promotions in supermarkets are perceived by food industry stakeholders.

Methods:  Semi-structured in-depth interviews are being conducted with 12-15 key informants, including current and former representatives of major food manufacturers, food retailers and other industry experts with experience related to price promotion policies and practices in the Australian supermarket setting. The interview guide was informed by Lewin’s organisational change theories. Key concepts included an exploration of organisational processes and the ‘forces’ that influence organisational strategy, to understand how price promotions are set and likely industry responses to potential policy action. Interview coding involves two stages with transcripts first analysed using a deductive approach and preliminary codes based on Lewin’s theories, followed by inductive coding as new themes emerge.

Results/findings:  The analysis is underway. Themes will relate to the facilitating and restraining ‘forces’ that may enable or inhibit the implementation of a healthy price promotion strategy in supermarkets. Using Lewin’s force field analysis, the themes will be synthesised into a Force Field Model to conceptualise the ‘forces’ that require strengthening and/or reducing to aid a change in food and beverage price promotion practices. Preliminary analysis indicates that stakeholder buy-in will be important, but any policy would need to be mandatory across food retailers.

Conclusions:  This study will provide insights on the potential barriers and enablers to changing the healthiness of food and beverage price promotions in supermarkets, which may inform the design of an effective public health strategy.

Purpose: In recent years there has been growing interest among researchers, urban planners and policymakers in the influence of the local food environment on household and individual food purchasing and consumption behaviour. The characteristics of regional food environments differ from those of urban food environments, however the importance of these characteristics in shaping food purchasing behaviours is unclear. Governments in many countries and at different levels have focused on improving health eating through a range of legislative, policy and practice strategies. For example, public health legislation in Victoria, Australia requires local governments to develop a public health and wellbeing plan every four years. Increasing healthy eating by investing in collaborative place-based approaches to healthy eating and increasing access to healthy food in communities has been identified as focus areas in the current planning cycle. However, it is unknown what priority regional local governments place on improving food environments, and what measures or indicators are used when incorporating action on food environments into the policy and planning process. The aim of this study was to identify how regional Victorian local governments prioritise, assess, plan and modify food environments to improve food access in regional Victorian communities.

Methods: Ten local government areas were purposively selected in inner and outer regional Victoria. A broad search of local government websites was conducted to identify, download and save publicly available policies and plans that may contain food environment improvement strategies. Policy documents were analysed using qualitative content analysis. A secondary key word search of the policy documents was undertaken to identify food access and food environment action, which was extracted and coded into relevant themes. NVivo v12 was used to support data analysis.

Results: Analyses are continuing, however preliminary analysis reveals regional local government policy documents contain limited action to improve local food environments.

Conclusions: Findings of this study will add new evidence and enhance understanding of the importance placed by regional local governments on improving food environments and food access for regional communities. Results will inform the development of recommendations regarding the potential role of local governments in improving food environments for regional communities.

Purpose: On average, Australian adults consume 3500mg sodium per day, almost twice the recommended maximum level of intake. The Australian government through the Healthy Food Partnership initiative has developed a voluntary reformulation program with sodium targets for 27 food categories. We estimated the potential impact of this program on household sodium purchases (mg/d per capita) and examined potential differences by income level. We also modelled and compared the effects of applying the existing United Kingdom (UK) reformulation program targets in Australia.

Methods: This study used one year of grocery purchase data (2018) from a nationally representative consumer panel of Australian households (Nielsen Homescan) that was linked with a packaged food and beverage database (FoodSwitch) that contains product-specific sodium information. Potential reductions in per capita sodium purchases were calculated and differences across income level were assessed by analysis of variance. All analyses were modelled to the Australian population in 2018.

Results: A total of 7,188 households were included in the analyses. The Healthy Food Partnership targets covered 4,307/26,728 (16.1%) unique products, which represented 22.3% of all packaged foods purchased by Australian households in 2018. Under the scenario that food manufacturers complied completely with the targets, sodium purchases will be reduced by 50mg/d per capita, equivalent to 3.5% of sodium currently purchased from packaged foods. Reductions will be greater in low-income households compared to high-income households (mean difference -7 mg/d, 95% CI: -4 to -11mg/d, P<0.001). If Australia had adopted the UK sodium targets, this would have covered 9,927 unique products, resulting in a reduction in per capita sodium purchases by 110mg/d.

Conclusions: The Healthy Food Partnership reformulation program is estimated to result in a very small reduction to sodium purchases.  There are opportunities to improve the program considerably through greater coverage and more stringent targets.

Purpose: Policies that aim to improve population diets through creating healthy food environments offer an important opportunity to reduce the burden of disease attributable to unhealthy diets. Healthy food environments can be created in public institutions by implementing nutrition standards, a set of food- or nutrient-based criteria applied to the procurement, preparation, provision or sale of foods. This systematic review aimed to identify countries with national nutrition standards to reduce salt intake in public institutions, and to describe and summarise these initiatives.

Methods: National salt reduction initiatives up to 2019 were identified through systematic search of peer-reviewed and grey literature, supplemented with verified information from salt reduction experts and country program leaders. Subsequently, cited policy documents were retrieved through an online search. Studies/documents containing information on national nutrition standards to reduce salt intake in public institutions were included. Characteristics of each country’s nutrition standards were extracted and summarised by region, country income level, institution type and approach to implementation, using a framework for monitoring foods in public institutions.

Results/findings: Sixty-one countries had nutrition standards to reduce salt intake in at least one public institution (schools, workplaces, hospitals, early-years settings, other educational settings and sport and recreation centres). Every identified country had nutrition standards in schools and almost half (26/61) had nutrition standards in more than one institution type. The majority were in Europe (31/61) and high-income countries (39/61). The total number of policies was 111. The most common strategy was applying both food- and nutrient-based standards (75/111), rather than either strategy alone. This was consistent across institution types but not across regions or income levels. More than half were mandatory (63/111), mostly in schools (41/63), Europe (33/63) high-income countries (35/63).

Conclusions: One-third of countries have nutrition standards to reduce salt intake in at least one public institution. In many countries, the opportunity exists to adapt current school nutrition standards to other types of public institutions to have greater impact on population diets. There is scope to develop standards and stimulate impact in most regions and particularly low- and lower-middle-income countries.

Purpose: Online food delivery (OFD) platforms capitalise on the accessibility of smartphone technology and are changing how consumers purchase food prepared outside of home. Young people dominate current usage and independent food outlets contribute a substantial proportion of outlets partnering with OFD platforms. However, the nutritional quality of these outlets’ offerings and how OFD-related marketing tactics may affect consumer choice is understudied. This study evaluated the nutritional quality and marketing attributes of all menu items from the most popular independent takeaways available on a market-leading OFD platform. 

Methods: The most popular food outlets from suburbs in NSW, Australia, with above-average populations of young people were investigated (identified by a previous study). Publicly available complete menus and marketing attributes from 202 independent takeaways were extracted via web scraping. Marketing attributes included a popularity cue (a category attracting greater visibility), price, offering as value bundle, use of image, nutritional information and dietary labelling. Menu items were classified into 38 novel food and beverage categories based on the Australian Dietary Guidelines. Categorical variables were analysed using Chi-squared and odds ratios. Continuous variables were analysed using Kruskal-Wallis tests.

Results/findings: Of 13841 menu items, 80.5% (11139/13841) were discretionary (foods high in saturated fat or added sugars, added salt or low in fibre). Discretionary menu items were more likely to be categorised as most popular (OR: 2.5, 95%CI 1.9–3.2), accompanied by an image (OR: 1.3, 95%CI 1.2–1.5), and offered as a value bundle (OR: 6.5, 95%CI 4.8–8.9). Few (<1%) of all menu items had nutritional information or dietary labelling. Two of the three discretionary food categories were more expensive than their healthier counterparts (P<0.02). 

Conclusions: The ubiquity of discretionary choices offered by independent takeaways highlights the need for their inclusion in public health policies such as point-of-sale menu labelling. Disparity in the use of marketing attributes across discretionary and healthier menu items suggests OFD platforms may favour unhealthier options, which warrants their consideration in public health policy.