Availability of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-authorised retailers' voluntary commitments to encourage healthy dietary purchases using marketing-mix and choice-architecture strategies

Abstract

Objective: To examine public commitments for encouraging United States consumers to make healthy dietary purchases with their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits among of prevalent SNAP-authorised retailers.Setting: National SNAP-authorised retail landscape in addition to stores located in California and Virginia, two states targetted for a Partnership for a Healthier America pilot social marketing campaign.Participants: SNAP-authorised retailers with the most store locations in selected settings.Design: A review of retailers' publicly available business information was conducted (November 2016-February 2017). Webpages and grey literature sources were accessed to identify corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports and commitments describing strategies to encourage healthy consumer purchases aligned with the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Evidence was organised using a marketing-mix and choice-architecture (MMCA) framework to characterise strategies used among eight possible types (i.e. place, profile, portion, pricing, promotion, priming, prompting and proximity).Results: Of the SNAP-authorised retailers (n 38) reviewed, more than half (n 20; 52·6 %) provided no information in the public domain relevant to the research objective. Few retailers (n 8; 21·1 %) had relevant CSR information; grey literature sources (n 52 articles across seventeen retailers) were more commonly identified. SNAP-authorised retailers in majority committed to increasing the number of healthy products available for purchase (profile).Conclusions: Substantial improvements are needed to enhance the capacity and commitments of SNAP-authorised retailers to use diverse strategies to promote healthy purchases among SNAP recipients. Future research could explore feasible approaches to improve dietary behaviours through sector changes via public-private partnerships, policy changes, or a combination of government regulatory and voluntary business actions.