Promoting Healthier Food Purchases By Leveraging the Online-Grocery Environment

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.