A food environments feedback system (FoodBack) for empowering citizens and change agents to create healthier community food places

Abstract

This study developed a systems-based approach (called FoodBack) to empower citizens and change agents to create healthier community food places. Formative evaluations were held with citizens and change agents in six diverse New Zealand communities, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with 85 change agents in Auckland and Hamilton in 2015-2016. The emerging system was additionally reviewed by public health experts from diverse organizations. A food environments feedback system was constructed to crowdsource key indicators of the healthiness of diverse community food places (i.e. schools, hospitals, supermarkets, fast food outlets, sport centers) and outdoor spaces (i.e. around schools), comments/pictures about barriers and facilitators to healthy eating and exemplar stories on improving the healthiness of food environments. All the information collected is centrally processed and translated into 'short' (immediate) and 'long' (after analyses) feedback loops to stimulate actions to create healthier food places. FoodBack, as a comprehensive food environment feedback system (with evidence databases and feedback and recognition processes), has the potential to increase food sovereignty, and generate a sustainable, fine-grained database of food environments for real-time food policy research.

Local Environment Action on Food project: impact of a community-based food environment intervention in Canada

“…These factors did not exist in isolation: they acted together to enable, to restrict and to determine the possibilities for change. Many of the identified barriers and facilitators align with previous research on creating community-based change for healthier food environments ( Naylor et al , 2010 , 2015 ; Vandevijvere et al , 2019 ). For example, interviews conducted with change agents in New Zealand revealed concerns about economic barriers, such as the cost of healthy options and a lack of power due to non-local control ( Vandevijvere et al , 2019 ).…”

Citizen science in monitoring food environments: a qualitative collective case study of stakeholders’ experiences during the Local Environment Action on Food project in Alberta, Canada

“…To apply this approach, citizen scientists would use the LEAF process to identify and enhance work that community stakeholders are already doing to improve children’s eating environments. A strengths-based approach is consistent with best practices of community-based obesity prevention [ 35 ] and aligns with previous work in citizen science food environment research [ 31 ].…”

“…Although we used Validation Meetings (step 5) to increase data accuracy, any additional data that was collected, analyzed, and graded as a result of this meeting further prolonged the whole LEAF process. Concerns about data accuracy and reliability are common in citizen science [ 31 , 36 ] and could have important implications for the impact of citizen science interventions. In our study, for example, if community stakeholders perceived the data in their Mini NRC as flawed, they might reject the results and recommendations for food environment action.…”

The first INFORMAS national food environments and policies survey in New Zealand: A blueprint country profile for measuring progress on creating healthy food environments

“…It would also stimulate national governments to include part of this monitoring as regular environments surveys, such as is done for food consumption surveys. Other potential ways for increasing sustainability include the use of crowdsourcing approaches, or to investigate use of existing datasets (eg, food price index and household budget surveys), and access to those that are not readily available currently (eg, food and beverage sales data). While this study presents a blueprint country profile for measuring progress on creating healthy food environments, some future developments are needed to increase the potential impact of this work. This includes the addition of a section to the country profile on benchmarking the country's efforts against other countries, the creation of a food environments score further summarizing the healthiness of food environments, and creating clear linkages with related areas (eg, undernutrition, physical activity, and sustainability).…”

“…It would also stimulate national governments to include part of this monitoring as regular environments surveys, such as is done for food consumption surveys. Other potential ways for increasing sustainability include the use of crowdsourcing approaches, 62,63 or to investigate use of existing datasets (eg, food price index and household budget surveys), and access to those that are not readily available currently (eg, food and beverage sales data).…”