Receptiveness of Low-Income Families to Healthy Eating Messages Targeting Children During Food Crisis

Background:  Grow Your Kids with Fruits and Veggies is a social marketing campaign intended to increase fruit and vegetable consumption among Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients.  The social marketing efforts engage people and programs with existing relationships with, and connections to SNAP populations to disseminate a consistent message:  Grow Your Kids with Fruits and Veggies. 

Program background:  The Michigan Nutrition Network’s Grow Your Kids With Fruits and Veggies (GYK) social marketing campaign has been used for four years. The initial phases utilized educators at events sharing materials and information in order to impact behavior. Research on that phase was completed in 2010. Based on what was learned in that phase plans were made to try a new approach. In this phase the burden would be on the materials, not educators, and they would be distributed to people in food crisis who were coming to food banks for assistance. In addition to evaluating the impact of the materials on increased intent to eat fruits and veggies a new component was added to the campaign to address portion size. To test this part of the campaign 1/6 of the recipients received the portion size materials, the rest did not. This allowed for segmenting for evaluation.  The campaign was administered between October 2010 and May 2011.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  This second intervention reached 60,000 low-income families. Response cards included with each bag asked about caregiver expectations that these materials would help their families eat more fruits and vegetables. Awareness of the portion-size item was also tested, along with an assessment of its impact on fruit and vegetable consumption.

Conclusions:  Preliminary data on intent to consume fruits and vegetables, use of a portion-size tool, and use of the GYK materials indicate that these materials, when distributed through food-bank sites has great promise in changing behaviors in low-income families.

Implications for research and/or practice:  With the increasing cost of commercial media effective methods are needed for delivering social marketing to low-income audiences.  This project demonstrates such a method. Funded by USDA, State of Michigan and Michigan Fitness Foundation