Clinical trial NCT02489396: Promoting Healthier Food Purchases By Leveraging the Online-Grocery Environment
Official title: Promoting Healthier Food Purchases By Leveraging the Online-Grocery Environment
Study type: OBSERVATIONAL
Overall status: UNKNOWN
Conditions: Obesity
Lead sponsor: University of Vermont
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2015-07-03
Enrollment: 400
Sex: ALL
Standard ages: CHILD
ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Observational model: OTHER
Time perspective: PROSPECTIVE
Sampling method: NON_PROBABILITY_SAMPLE
Study population: All orders placed on any of the Rosie sites or apps in the study period will be included. No active recruiting of participants will take place, data will only be collected from existing Rosie customers. Participants will not be informed that manipulations are happening on the website, other than notices the company occasionally displays when they are revising features of the website. In order to determine whether any of the proposed "mindless" interventions actually work, it is imperative that consumer attention not be drawn to changes in the site. It is expected that 400-1000 orders per month will be included as part of the study during each two-month intervention period.

Brief summary: Rationale: Online-grocery shopping is predicted to be one of the "hottest" food trends of 2014, as national retailers such as Amazon, as well as start-up companies, venture into the e- commerce grocery sector. Importantly, the online-grocery environment could be uniquely manipulated to promote healthier food purchasing and help with weight control. Since consumers tend to choose items listed first on menus and buffet lines, the order of food products displayed on the grocer's website may impact purchasing. Furthermore, it's possible that in an online-grocery environment, nutrition information could be made more salient to consumers. For example, previous research has demonstrated that label color influences perceptions of the healthfulness of foods. The FDA also recently proposed a redesign of foods' nutrition facts panels, which would highlight calorie content in a larger font. Although implementing this label change on all food labels could take years, e-commerce sites could change the format of the nutritional information they display much more quickly.

Objectives: The proposed study intends to nudge consumers to make healthier grocery purchases through three distinct interventions: 1.) Manipulating the order of food items within grocery categories; 2.) Displaying product nutrition information in red or green; and 3.) Presenting calorie information in a larger font size. We propose to examine these concepts in adult consumers using a grocery e-commerce platform servicing socioeconomically and racially diverse communities in the northeastern U.S.


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Shopping on a Rosie grocery site

Exclusion Criteria:

* No exclusion criteria, all orders will be eligible

Primary outcomes:
measure: Food Purchasing of targeted items
timeFrame: Continuously throughout the intervention expected average of 52 weeks
measure: Click Rate of targeted food items
timeFrame: Continuously throughout the intervention expected average of 52 weeks
measure: Nutrient Analysis of Food Purchased by consumers
timeFrame: Continuously throughout the intervention expected average of 52 weeks
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Burlington
country: United States
facility: University of Vermont
state: Vermont
Study officials:
References: