Research Leads To 10 More Questions
By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business
In decades of writing columns for this magazine, we received and reviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of research reports. If we had to say what we learned from this review, it would be this: The answer you get depends on the question you ask.
This research basically tests whether marketing can be successful with children in school when it comes to produce. Not surprisingly, children and fresh produce are not exempt from the many techniques that industry spends billions on every year to maintain and to change procurement habits.
As with all good research, this project raises many questions for further study:
1. Is there a connection between students taking more produce on their plate and higher consumption at that meal? In other words, if I don’t like to drink alcohol, social pressure might make me take a drink from the bar just to have one in my hand. But that doesn’t mean I drink it. If social pressure to be healthy is driving kids to take more produce, is it also driving them to eat it?
2. If children do eat more produce in the cafeteria, do they compensate and eat less at other parts of the day? If they have a big salad at lunch, does that develop the taste for salad, and they eat more salad at dinner? Or do they tire of the salad experience and eat less salad at other dayparts.
3. Whatever the impact of these videos and banners, does it dissipate over time? Maybe the banners and videos initially stimulate interest and thus trial, but if you keep playing the same videos and keep the same banners up, do they become background noise and wallpaper?
4. Do these marketing efforts have long-term effects? In other words, if we do a year of this marketing, does it impact what the children take from the salad bar next year? In high school? In college? As adults?
5. Is there a downside? Do children who are stimulated to take produce make bad combinations that turn them off produce? In other words, would we be better off having chefs create composed salads that don’t cause indigestion?
6. Will the kids eat kale? All produce is not created equal. It is one thing to get children to select sweet fruits, even certain vegetables, such as carrots and peas, but what about getting children to eat bitter vegetables and other produce items that are believed to have valuable nutritional qualities? Do these banners and videos do that?
7. To what degree does the health education component have any real impact? The study shows that the video had a big impact, but if instead of having a health message, those videos had the produce items doing funny dances or had celebrities eating the produce…would this have been more or less effective?
8. Does eating more produce actually improve the health of the children?For example, do children who are taught to eat more produce reduce consumption of other foods, or do they tend to get heavier as time goes by?
9. Do children who learn about produce influence their parents to change their eating and shopping habits? There are many anecdotal stories about children turning against smoking through education and then convincing their parents to quit. Does this dynamic work with diet?
10. Will willingness to accept produce continue to increase with more marketing? The study indicates that adding the video to the signage boosts the amount of produce on children’s plates. What if we add other promotions, such as online, audio, table-tents cards on the tables, etc.?
There are many other questions to be answered, such as how the impact of the promotion differs on different ethnic groups or income demographics. Most of these children received free or subsidized school lunches: How does the dynamic change when one has to pay hard-earned money to buy more produce?
But for now, we can tip a hat to the researchers for reminding us that produce is a consumer good that needs to be constantly marketed and promoted if we want to increase consumption.