2019 CAFLP Annual Conference Panel Recap: “Access to Good Food: Food Boxes, Corner Stores and Beyond”

Are we doing it right? From in-store retailer interventions to Corner Stores and the Good Food Boxes, panelists assessed current approaches to increasing access to good food. Let us learn from lessons shared.

When there are so many complex causal paths, the direction to take in navigating food environments is unclear. Dr Catherine Mah, Canada Research Chair in Promoting Healthy Populations and Associate Professor at Dalhousie University, and her team dived into the literature on retail food environment studies and their impact on diet. They found that 67% of the studies on retail food environment interventions from 1974-2018 showed at least one positive effect on diet. While a majority focused on geographic access, a slice of the research examined in-store interventions. In-store interventions, such as reducing merchandising of sugary foods, were shown to be particularly effective. In light of these findings, the continued reliance on providing information to consumers to change their behavior seems to be missing the retailer as a target. While retailers may provide a site for change, interventions must respond to the challenges that they face. Of the 50 supermarket intervention studies, 0% measured the economic effects for the retailer.

Retailers’ experiences were indeed crucial to assess the 2017-2018 Good Food Corner Stores (GFCS) pilot program. Meghan Lynch, researcher and doctoral student at the University of Toronto, was part of a team who conducted semi-structured interviews with 8 store owners, including 6 GFCS participants. Their experiences revealed that providing fresh produce is extremely resource-intensive for small food retailers. Most corner stores do not have delivery at their door: “I am physically going, collecting, buying, shopping, carrying, marking, and then putting [products] on the selves”. And with fruits and vegetables, prices change from week to week and place to place: “I go every day, shopping before I go into work… in order to find the cheapest”. Low and unpredictable consumer demand also tends to create waste and, at the end of day, corner stores can’t compete, price-wise, with grocery stores. Future interventions will have to be designed to address the specific barriers faced by food retailers.

Longstanding initiatives, such as the 30-year-old Good Food Box program, sometimes also need to be re-modeled. Laëtitia Eyssartel, the Director of Operations at FoodShare, took on the task of evaluating the impacts of the program aimed at providing accessible and affordable good food. Her findings: “Not great”. The program could not cover its operational costs and relied heavily on subsidies and volunteers. As for participants, a majority had greater means than expected. “People told us that they buy the box not because they need it, but because they want to support FoodShare”.  Since it did not meet its intended goals, the Good Food Box was reinvented, adopting a social enterprise model to meet the needs of its current participants.

As a new-comer in the field of food law and policy, I realize that interventions are constant work-in-progress-always-in-need-of-more-research beasts. Yet, such complex, metamorphosing creatures are needed to fight the problems of our food system. Rather than seeking the best solutions, I am learning to work for always-better solutions.