Engaging convenience stores in healthier food provision

Many people in the UK, especially those with limited mobility, rely on small local stores – convenience stores or corner shops – to do their daily grocery shopping. Evidence shows that these shops tend to have lower availability of healthy and fresh food options and are often more expensive.

In combating diet-related ill health, food ‘environments’  – the settings where we buy our food and the options available – have become a focus of public health initiatives. Engaging local food retailers in these initiatives is a key step towards improving people’s access to better, healthier food.  But motivating the retailers to join healthy food initiatives has proved challenging, for various reasons. This project is reviewing evidence on interventions that have helped convenience stores to stock healthier food, and looks in detail at three UK schemes, to elicit lessons and barriers. It aims to provide guidance to practitioners on how to work more effectively with small-scale local food businesses to boost access to healthy diets.

Image by Unisouth shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.