Nudged into a healthy supermarket shop

The Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH), who are a member of the Sustain alliance, are behind a new supermarket called 'Nudge'. It's a pop-up at the People's Supermarket in Holburn, London and has been designed by public health experts to improve shopping habits.

The shop gives greater visibility to healthy foods and uses cartoon characters to promote fruit and vegetables. The RSPH accompanied the launch of Nudge with a report: 'Health on the Shelf' which demonstrates how changing the layout of a store can encourage shoppers to buy healthier foods.

Research for the report discovered that 15% of people believe supermarkets cause them to 'go off track' in their efforts to lose weight and more than one in three claim they impulse-buy unhealthy food and drinks because supermarkets put them on special offer.

Recommendations from Health on the Shelf report

Retailers

To adopt a set of key principles to apply to all major supermarket retailers, to include:

• Layout: Greater allocation of shelf space to healthier products, based on the Government’s EatWell guide
• Pricing: Use cartoon characters on healthy products such as fruit and vegetables; introduce a healthy rewards scheme
• Shopper experience: Supermarkets to introduce cookery demonstrations on how to use ingredients and provide recipe cards and advice

Government

• Business rate reductions for supermarkets and retailers who take health seriously by adopting key principles
• Explore introducing a healthy rating scheme, similar to the FSA’s Food Hygiene Rating Scheme ‘scores on the doors’, based on the proportion of healthy and unhealthy products stocked