A Southampton-led study has shown customers bought healthier foods with a new supermarket layout. Dr Christina Vogel and Prof Janis Baird led the study, in partnership with the national supermarket chain Iceland Foods Ltd.
Promoting healthy choices
The new layout positioned an expanded fruit and vegetables section near the entrance. They also removed sweets and chocolate from checkouts and at the end of the opposite aisles, replacing these with non-food items and water.
They monitored store sales in a selection of Iceland stores in England, as well as the purchasing and dietary patterns of a sample of regular customers. They found the new layout prompted customers to make healthier food purchases, with more fruit and vegetables. The study results are published in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine.
When talking about the results of the study, Dr Vogel said: “Altering the layouts of supermarkets could help people make healthier food choices and shift population diet towards the government’s dietary recommendations. The findings of our study suggest that a healthier store layout could lead to nearly 10,000 extra portions of fruit and vegetables and approximately 1,500 fewer portions of confectionery being sold on a weekly basis in each store.”
Informing UK government decisions
This research is more comprehensive than previous studies testing whether placement strategies can promote healthier food purchasing, which have been limited in scope, for example including only a single location (i.e. checkouts) or placing healthy and unhealthy products together. This study went further, aiming to reduce customers exposure to calorie opportunities by placing non-food items at checkouts and the ends of the opposite aisles and measuring effects on store sales, customer loyalty card purchasing patterns and the diets of more than one household member.
Matt Downes, Head of Format Development at Iceland, said: “We have been pleased to support this long-term study and the evaluation of how product placement in supermarkets can affect the diets of our customers. We know that childhood obesity is a growing issue and the retail industry has its part to play in tackling this. We hope that the outcomes of the study provide insights for the wider retail industry and policy makers about the impact of store merchandising on purchasing decisions.”
Prof Baird added: “These results provide novel evidence to suggest that the intended UK government ban on prominent placement of unhealthy foods across retail outlets could be beneficial for population diet, and that effects may be further enhanced if requirements for a produce section near supermarket entrances were incorporated into the regulation."