Effectiveness Needs Testing

By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business

It is, of course, fantastic news that PMA is investing half a million dollars to help the Produce for Better Health Foundation (PBH) get a new partnership with Scholastic, Inc. off the ground. To assist mothers in feeding their families better, to assist children, as Bryan says, in “…understanding the sheer fun and joyfulness of eating fresh fruits and vegetables…” Well, who could be opposed?

Nobody — and that just may be a problem. The goal — increasing produce consumption — is so universally shared and the general means — focusing on young children still forming their eating habits — so universally lauded that it is hard for anyone to raise his or her hand and ask if this concept has actually been tested.

The exchange Bryan and I do in these pages every month is mostly about research; it is about ways to find the truth, and one of the big lessons is that, sometimes, what seems to make perfect sense, in fact, doesn’t achieve the goals that we seek to achieve.

Bryan tips his hat to this truth when he so correctly points out, “Knowledge is one thing. Behavior, as any marketer knows all too well, is, of course, something else.”

And just as knowledge does not automatically equal behavioral change, so does design not always equal effectiveness. So when Bryan speaks of the new Fruits & Veggies — More Matters campaign and explains, “Whereas 5-A-Day helped consumers know they need to eat more fruits and vegetables, the new brand’s motivational messaging and how-to tools are designed to encourage consumers to, in fact, do it.”

We have to praise the organizers and designers of the new program. After all, to get consumers to eat more produce — to “do it” — is precisely the challenge. Yet the fact a program has been designed with this goal in mind tells us nothing about its effectiveness.

Maybe communicating “joyfulness” results in higher consumption. Maybe not. Maybe it does for a little while and then the message, and its effectiveness, fade.

Maybe the message doesn’t resonate at all with consumers who find consuming more fresh produce not “fun and joyful” but a burden when compared to throwing a box of Oreos in the car. Or maybe the problem is not messaging but something substantive, such as being unfamiliar with the taste of many produce items.

Fortunately, the program Bryan mentions will reach 300,000 students the first year and double each successive year. That means there are plenty of students who will not be exposed to the Scholastic materials, which sets up a perfect control group for a test.

PBH should hire an objective researcher to evaluate produce consumption in students exposed to the Scholastic program and students who are not. This study must go beyond surveys to include food diaries, register tape receipts, weigh-ins and other indicators of health. By doing this in a double-blind way, in which the students and the researchers do not know we are studying produce consumption, we could actually have a test to see if the program is being effective.

It is very important that students for the control group be selected from areas where the program is not expected to roll out, so the students will remain an uninfluenced sample. It is also important, if the study shows some effectiveness, that the study continues after students have left the target-age group of third and fourth graders. After all, we want to know if we are changing eating patterns for life or just while the program is ongoing.

Like Bryan, this author tries to be an optimist as well, so, hopefully, we will find the program is working splendidly, and five years from now we will be able to report that children exposed to the Scholastic materials both eat better and are healthier, and especially that they are less likely to be obese than the control group, which was given just standard advice by school and health-care providers.

This writer will remain optimistic even if the results don’t show that. Optimism would be justified because through research we would be learning what approaches didn’t work, and then we could look at changing the message or trying a different approach.

In this issue, you can see some material selected from Produce Business’ sister Web site PerishablePundit.com. On this page, we highlight some of what we’ve written about a program, now rolling out nationally in Ireland, called Food Dudes.

The Food Dudes program is geared toward changing behavior, and 18-month-long follow-up research indicates it succeeds in getting children to eat more fruits and vegetables. Experience and research have revealed specific techniques that help increase consumption. For example, it happens that many children start out saying they “don’t like” certain items — even after they have tried them. Continuous sampling over time, however, changes that perception, and many children acquire a taste for items they previously avoided. This opening up of more variety, more options for consumption, seems to lead to more consumption.

The point is there are many experiments that can be tried to increase consumption. A salute to PMA and PBH for trying this effort with Scholastic and a plea to make sure adequate research is done so we can know if we have a success or need to try another way.