Background: In Australia, poor diet is a leading cause of disease burden and improving child nutrition is a health priority. School canteens represent an ideal setting in which to deliver public health nutrition strategies. Online canteens, where parents or students order and pay for their child’s lunch online, represent a novel and attractive opportunity to deliver interventions to improve healthy food purchases at scale with high fidelity.
Aim: Given the increasing use of online canteens, the researchers sought to investigate the efficacy of using an online canteen system to deliver a consumer behavior intervention to improve the healthiness of canteen lunch order purchases for primary school students. This presentation comprehensively describes the study protocol for a cluster randomized trial investigating this research question.
Methods: Ten NSW schools currently using an online canteen will be randomised in a 1:1 ratio to receive either the intervention or control (standard online ordering only). The intervention will include a suite of consumer behavior strategies to encourage healthy food purchase including i) availability (increasing availability of healthy items), menu labelling, placement and prompting. Intervention efficacy will be assessed through between group comparison of the nutritional value of lunch order purchases, as recorded by the online ordering system at baseline (6 month period pre-intervention) and follow up (6-month period post-intervention commencement). Specifically, the trial will assess the total kilojoule, saturated fat, sugar and sodium content of food and beverages purchased of online lunch orders and ii) the proportion of foods purchased of high (green) and low (red) nutritional value as determined by state canteen policy.
Conclusion: The proposed trial represents the first randomized trial internationally to examine the efficacy of an online intervention on improving healthy food purchases from a primary school canteen