Healthy choices start in the supermarket

Text: René Didde | Photo: Shutterstock

We eat too much fat, too much sugar, too much salt and just plain too much. Indeed, consumers face temptation on all sides. Almost 80 per cent of the assortment in supermarkets is not in the Wheel of Five (the Dutch guide to healthy food) and nearly 83 per cent of the products on offer in folders – with ‘two-for-one’ discounts and so on – are unhealthy, according to The Healthy Generation. This multi-year programme was set up by around 20 health funds, including the Diabetes Fund, the Heart Foundation and the Kidney Foundation. The programme aims to make the environment children grow up in healthier. This spring, the alliance started a campaign to get supermarkets to make their assortments healthier.

But efforts to persuade consumers to make healthier choices when shopping have been going on for longer than that. For example, last year saw the introduction of the Nutri-Score, originally a French initiative, after three trial years in the Netherlands. It uses the letters A through to E and five colours – from green to red – to show at a glance which products in a particular category are healthiest.

Effective interventions

The Wageningen researcher Ellen van Kleef has been studying the temptations in the food environment, such as supermarkets and cafeterias, for years. The associate professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour looks for effective interventions that foster healthier behaviour. ‘There are high expectations of what labels such as the Nutri-Score can achieve, but our field studies, experiments and analyses of till receipts show that labels only have a small effect on what products are actually purchased,’ she says. People in the ‘health-conscious bubble’ pay attention to the labels but this approach doesn’t work for consumers in disadvantaged socioeconomic groups, for instance, notes Van Kleef. ‘We even see the reverse effect among some young people, who choose the red one deliberately because they assume it’s deliciously unhealthy.’ Van Kleef mainly feels labelling is too easy a solution. ‘Add a colour on the front and some text on the back, and you’re done.’

Perhaps we need a radical change in what is acceptable, as happened with smoking. Nowadays, cars don’t even have built-in ashtrays anymore. ‘That comparison doesn’t really work,’ says Van Kleef. ‘We want to discourage smoking altogether. You can do that by banning smoking in public spaces and by charging extremely high prices for a packet of cigarettes. But to persuade people to make healthy, sustainable food choices, you need to take a gradual approach.’

That is demonstrated by an experiment Van Kleef did a few years ago in the cafeteria of a vocational college in Ede. ‘Every couple of months, we made the assortment that little bit more healthy,’ says Van Kleef. ‘We started at 60 per cent healthy and increased it to 70 per cent and then 80 per cent. We monitored sales for a year. We also made the cafeteria more appealing with a greater choice of rolls and a more pleasing interior design.’ This gradual approach led to the students making healthier choices, although the effects were modest.

Van Kleef thinks it is a big problem that there are still fast-food outlets located close to schools. She says there is huge potential for improvements among young people. Schools already teach children about the importance of a healthy diet, and parents do their best too. ‘But this isn’t having enough of an effect,’ says Van Kleef. ‘Parents don’t have so much say once their children get to secondary school, with more freedom and their own money. There is huge social pressure on young people to consume snacks and sugary drinks.’

That’s before we get onto the influence of YouTube, TikTok, films and events. ‘Take the tube of Pringles on the table that is incorporated into YouTuber Dylan Hagens’ storylines, or the prominent Red Bull logo in the coverage of Formula 1 racing.’

Foodfluencers

In Wageningen’s Strategic Communications chair group, associate professor Sophie Boerman studies the effect of social media influencers – the greenfluencers and foodfluencers, as they are known – on the sustainability and healthiness of young people’s habits. Young people spend hours every day on social media like TikTok and Instagram.

‘Elize Been, the Netherlands’ first greenfluencer, hasn’t yet got followers in the millions, but her reach is growing,’ says Boerman. ‘She shows her followers how to make more environmentally aware choices, for example by buying second-hand clothing or promoting sustainable brands. We ran various experiments that showed these influencers can indeed persuade young people to be more sustainable.’

Surprisingly, and contrary to the researchers’ expectations, young people were more susceptible to messages that emphasized loss than positive messages. ‘A message such as “The planet will be destroyed if you don’t make sustainable choices” has more effect than a message framed as “Your choices help make the world a better place”,’ explains Boerman. ‘Negative messages make you ashamed of your non-sustainable habits and therefore people are more likely to choose the sustainable option.’

But how reliable are green influencers and food influencers in a world with so many false claims and misleading ‘information’? After all, influencers are paid a lot to recommend products. ‘That is why more and more influencers are getting certification – a Dutch initiative. The certificate shows they are aware of the latest rules on influencer marketing, such as transparency and avoiding greenwashing, and that they take a responsible approach to it,’ says Boerman. She thinks NGOs and supermarket chains could use the certified influencers. ‘The Netherlands Nutrition Centre already does this in an effort to reduce meat consumption. Influencers post videos showing you how to cook tasty vegetarian food.’

Supermarkets themselves are also important in getting people to switch to a healthier or more sustainable diet. We buy as much as 80 per cent of our food there, including fruit and vegetables. Supermarkets have a lot of influence on what we buy through the way they present the food. Products at eye level sell better than the ones on the bottom shelf. When tempting chocolate is placed next to the cash till, lots of people will grab a bar at the last moment. Supermarket designers, marketing experts and last but not least the branch managers could use these tactics to promote healthy and sustainable products instead, say the Wageningen researchers.

Meat substitutes

That was shown by a six-month study in 2023 at 70 branches of the Lidl supermarket chain. In the experiment, meat substitutes such as veggie burgers were placed right next to the familiar meat products in the meat section. The meat substitutes were also available at their usual place in the supermarket. ‘We initially got a lot of negative comments, especially on social media,’ says Monique van der Meer, who carried out the experiment as a PhD researcher in the Marketing and Consumer Behaviour chair group. Some people thought it was misleading and they didn’t appreciate what they saw as officious meddling, she recalls. ‘That was mainly at the start of the trial. After a while, the highly polarizing comments on social media – “That’ll just make me eat a load of hamburgers” – died down.’ The experiment had an effect. Consumption of meat substitutes increased slightly, even though sales of meat only fell a little. ‘It seems a lot of people liked the idea of trying a soya burger or beetroot burger for once.’

A similar trial was conducted in seven branches of another large supermarket chain for three months. This time, the meat substitutes weren’t still available in their usual place. In this experiment, sales of meat substitutes dropped significantly. ‘Certainly to start with, the regular group of vegetarians and flexitarians were unable to find their products.’

This experiment with two variants in two different supermarket chains is an example of ‘nudging’, the concept of giving people a little push in the right direction. ‘Supermarkets could work on this far more,’ thinks Monique van der Meer. ‘For example, they could offer more vegetarian options in the fresh-ingredient meal kits, including ones with attractive recipes. Supermarkets that sell ready meals for cooking in the oven or microwave could offer more options based on vegetables alongside the fish and meat options.’

Shopping online

More and more people are doing a weekly shop online that is then delivered to their home rather than rushing off to the shops after work. ‘Here too, there are big opportunities for persuading consumers to make healthy food choices,’ says Laura Jansen. In June, she obtained her doctorate in the Marketing and Consumer Behaviour chair group for ‘personalized recommendations’ for healthy food choices when shopping online.

Her research, in which 1200 people did their supermarket shopping in an experimental online site, showed that it is important for the recommendations to be a subtle presence on the screen. ‘It turned out that presenting information on the landing page, the first page when visiting the online supermarket, can lead to healthier purchases. As can information in the form of a shopping basket full of healthy alternatives to previous purchases,’ says Jansen. ‘That was despite the fact that the pre-filled shopping basket concept was not judged positively.’

Product recommendations that tie in with personal preferences specified by the user in advance have more of an impact, shows another study by Jansen, this time among 900 people. ‘Users first have to go to a special page to indicate their preferences, such as “I’d like to eat fewer sweet things” or “I want help finding products with less salt and fat”,’ explains Jansen. ‘The participants really appreciated it if a text bubble then appeared while they were shopping saying “this is an option in this product category with less sugar” for instance and we added a short explanation. A personal recommendation increased the participants’ acceptance of the recommendation and they were less likely to find it too pushy. Of course, this experiment needs to be followed up with a trial in a real, existing online supermarket.’

Effect on producers

In The Hague, researcher Koen Boone of Wageningen Social & Economic Research puts the limited effect of labels such as the Nutri-Score into perspective. ‘Labels help consumers but above all they have an effect on producers. If all products have certification, 100 per cent of consumption will have become more sustainable,’ says Boone. ‘A label with good supporting evidence helps bring about improvements in the whole supply chain. It also helps other organizations, such as financial institutions, factor in sustainability in their decisions. A company with a better sustainability profile has lower financial risks and so banks can offer it lower interest rates. In the end, this will give producers clarity.’

Boone, who is the Sustainable Value Chains coordinator, has been working on a uniform European sustainability label for food since 2023 (see inset). The researcher believes in the power of labels, ‘not least because they can help companies genuinely demonstrate the validity of their brand’s reputation, and therefore the financial and economic value.’

Healthy is more expensive

Back to Wageningen, where researcher Van Kleef points to the importance of the price. ‘On average, healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food,’ she says. ‘The government could even that out by introducing different VAT rates. But the problem is that the government has done very little in terms of setting and enforcing standards in recent years. They very much take the attitude that choosing healthy food is “the consumer’s own responsibility”.’

Nevertheless, she thinks new trends in research, such as Jansen’s study on algorithms that promote healthier alternatives in online shopping baskets, are promising for practical applications. ‘But of course the quickest route is to make the entire supermarket assortment healthier and stop offering discounts or freebies mainly for the unhealthy products.’