Kids in a Candy Store:  An objective analysis of children's interactions with food in convenience stores

Abstract

Background: Increasing rates of childhood obesity worldwide has focused attention on the obesogenic food environment and how it influences dietary behaviour and bodyweight in children. The neighbourhood convenience store is a key setting in children’s food environments. The Kids’Cam study enabled the objective measurement of the world in which children live. This paper reports on an analysis of children’s interaction with food in convenience stores.Methods: Kids’Cam NZ was a cross-sectional study conducted from July 2014 to June 2015 in the Wellington region of New Zealand, in which 168 randomly selected children aged 11-14 years old wore a wearable camera for a 4-day period. The camera captured a 136° image of the children’s surroundings every seven seconds. In this ancillary study, ‘Kids’Cam Convenience Stores’, images from children who visited a convenience store were manually coded for food and drink availability, marketing, purchase and consumption. Results: Twenty-two percent of children (n=37) visited convenience stores on 62 occasions during the 4-day data collection period. Non-core items dominated the food and drinks available to children in convenience stores at a rate of 8.3 to 1 (means, 300 non-core and 36 core, respectively). The food and drinks marketed in-store were overwhelmingly non-core, and promoted using accessible placement, price offers, product packaging, and signage. Most of the 70 items purchased by children were non-core foods or drinks (94.6%) and all of the purchased food or drink subsequently consumed by children was non-core. Confectionary and sugary drinks were the items most frequently purchased and consumed. Conclusions: This research highlights convenience stores as a key source of unhealthy food and drink for children, where unhealthy food and drinks are marketed, available, and subsequently purchased and consumed. Policies are urgently needed to reduce the role of convenience stores in the obesogenic food environment in which children live.