The Partnership no. 17

Trends From awareness to

Trends From awareness to action! The fact that a good diet plays an important role in good health is nothing new. And nor is raising awareness of this among consumers. What is new is that more and more initiatives are being launched to help people make conscious choices when it comes to healthy eating. Healthy eating Time and again, research shows that a healthy diet can improve the quality of life and can even help prevent certain diseases. But with the growing availability of cheap, highly processed ready meals in recent decades, the healthy choice is no longer naturally made. We have lost the balance between refined food and unrefined natural products that still contain a full range of vitamins and minerals. How do you convince the general, healthy public to eat more vegetables, one of the main components in a healthy diet? According to marketing experts Anne-Marie Roerink and Hans Verwegen, there are three ways to do this: encourage people to buy vegetables, make this an easy choice for them, and offer help where the knowledge needed to make that choice is lacking. Encouraging people to buy vegetables with discounts and incentives Healthcare costs are sky-rocketing. So it’s hardly surprising that insurance companies are coming up with ways to get their customers to adopt a healthier lifestyle as a way of preventing ill health later in life. “Some American health insurance companies are working with businesses to offer discounts or incentives to people who don’t smoke or have quitted, who get vaccinated, or who follow a special diet such as Weight Watchers,” Anne-Marie Roerink of US company '210 Analytics' explains. “They also encourage people to eat healthily: for example, by offering a discount if you have eaten a variety of different-coloured fruit and vegetables every day. They have a special system for this which you have to log into to record what you have eaten.” Insurance companies in the Netherlands (Europe?) are also doing their bit by incentivising special diets designed to reverse the adverse effects of certain diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, but also Crohn’s disease and arthritis. On the shop floor Supermarkets are also latching onto this trend in a big way, with more and clearer information on packaging, healthy convenience products and special shelves in stores to help influence consumers’ decision-making processes. This is often referred to as nudging. And it has been shown to work. A joint experiment was set up by the Netherlands Nutrition Centre, the industry association and researchers to investigate the extent to which the in-store environment influences consumers’ food choices. A supermarket branch was converted for six weeks into a ‘Go For Colour Lab’ in which fruit and vegetables were given a more prominent position by making subtle changes to the in-store environment. The nudges ranged from access gates and shopping cart inlays to healthy options at the checkouts. After analising the sales figures from the control supermarket, it was found that even little nudges made it easier for people to make healthy choices. Bearing in mind that research has shown that we make around two hundred food choices every day – mostly impulsively, automatically and subconsciously – it is clear that there is a wealth of opportunities to positively impact people’s healthy eating behaviour by nudging. 16 | The Partnership The Partnership | 17