Building on a Point-of-purchase Intervention to Encourage Healthy Food Choices

Mass General Brigham

Status: Completed

Conditions: Food Labeling

Treatments: Behavioral: Feedback plus incentives; Behavioral: Feedback letters

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01604499

2011D004784

Details and patient eligibility

About

This study builds on the framework of a previously implemented color-coded food labeling intervention in a hospital cafeteria by testing the incremental effectiveness of providing employees with individual feedback and incentives for increasing healthy purchases in a 3-arm randomized controlled trial. The investigators hypothesize that employees assigned to receive feedback will increase healthy purchases more than employees who receive no contact and that employees who receive feedback plus incentives will increase healthy purchases more than those who receive feedback alone.

Enrollment: 2,672 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Employee at Massachusetts General Hospital who uses a cafeteria debit card to pay for cafeteria purchases

Exclusion criteria

• Employees who do not have a cafeteria debit card
• Employees with cafeteria debit card but who use it fewer than 3 times a month for the 3 months prior to start of trial

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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2,672 participants in 3 patient groups

Feedback only

Experimental group

Description:

Subjects receive feedback letters about the proportion of green, yellow, and red purchases in the cafeteria per month with comparisons to "all employees" and to the "healthiest employees eaters"

Treatment:

Behavioral: Feedback letters

Feedback plus incentives

Experimental group

Description:

Subjects receive feedback letters plus small incentives to increase healthy (green-labeled) purchases in the next month

Treatment:

Behavioral: Feedback plus incentives

Control group

No Intervention group