Beyond Food Safety: How Public and Private Policies Can Guide the Design of Healthier Supermarket Environments ^†

Abstract

While policies targeting education in schools, marketing campaigns, and taxation strategies are of great importance to tackle our population’s malnutrition, there is growing concern about enhancing the supermarket environment to promote healthier food consumption. Public and private policies targeting the food retail sector can contribute to achieving this goal. Supermarkets play a significant role in presenting food options. As gatekeepers of the food system’s impact on consumers’ health, they have the power to help people make better food choices. Examples include making healthy checkouts and nudging consumption of vegetables through infographics. Currently, few policies specify how supermarkets’ environments could be set up to improve healthy purchases (e.g., the “Partnership for a healthy diet” in Norway and “hange4Life Convenience Stores” in the UK). Furthermore, we see recent shifts in the policy agendas of countries like Germany and Argentina, with new nutrition behavioural policies being legislated and implemented. However, we lack general guidelines that unify the available information on this topic. Addressing this gap has the potential to guide future supermarket policy recommendations. We will perform a review and delve deeper to search for governmental policies and policies of major supermarket brands in selected countries (i.e., Germany and Argentina) to taxonomize the policy initiatives, examining their projects and campaigns designed to improve supermarket environments and encourage consumers to choose healthy options. We will harvest sources published since the release of the SDGs (2015), from ScienceDirect, the FAO policy search engine Informas, and the NOURISHING platform. We will identify the grey literature by searching related websites and databases as well as national government pages or private supermarket policy documents. We will extract the information relevant to policymaking to improve environments in terms of product reformulation, labelling strategies, placement, product processes, and sweet beverage representation. While spotting incentive, procurement, and regulative policies, we will group them in terms of interventions and further taxonomize the different approaches/initiatives. Our objective is to provide unified policy recommendations by leveraging existing experiences and policies and designing applicable recommendations to improve the food environment in supermarkets. Furthermore, we aim to promote the creation of science-based policies that consider these recommendations.