The habitual nature of food purchases at the supermarket: Implications for policy making

Machín, Leandro; Curutchet, María Rosa; Gugliucci, Vanessa; Vitola, Agustina; Otterbring, Tobias; Alcântara, Marcela de; Ares, Gastón

doi:10.1016/j.appet.2020.104844

Cited by 71 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…[149][150][151] For instance, changing placement of healthy and unhealthy foods, banning ultra-processed foods from check out and placing them out of the reach of children, along with changes in promotional strategies of ultra-processed foods are promising strategies but lack sufficient realworld testing. 152 More recently, researchers are employing innovative methods, such as the use of eye-tracking technology, 153,154 consumer panels, 155 and experiments using virtual 156 and real-life store labs to better understand children and caregivers' real-world shopping behaviors and the uniqueness of stores that serve Latino populations.…”

Section: Food Retailmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food environment solutions for childhood obesity in Latin America and among Latinos living in the United States

et al. 2021

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Summary The food environment is a major contributor to unhealthy diets in children and, therefore, to the increasing rates of obesity. Acclaimed by scholars across the world, Latin American countries have been leaders in implementing policies that target different aspects of the food environment. Evidence on the nature and to what extent children are exposed and respond to unhealthy food environments in the region and among Latinos in the United States is, however, deficient. The objective of this review is to use the integrated International Network for Food and Obesity/noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) Research, Monitoring and Action Support (INFORMAS) framework to create healthy food environment to (i) compare the key elements of childhood obesity‐related food environments in Latin America and for Latinos living in the United States; (ii) describe the evidence on solutions to improve childhood obesity‐related food environments; and (iii) identify research priorities to inform solutions to fight childhood obesity in these populations. We found that an integrated body of evidence is needed to inform an optimal package of policies to improve food environments to which children in Latin America and Latino children in the United States are exposed and more efficiently translate policy solutions to help curb growing childhood obesity levels across borders.

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Section: Food Retailmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food environment solutions for childhood obesity in Latin America and among Latinos living in the United States

et al. 2021

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“…Moreover, what once was adaptive in our ancestral past may now lead to suboptimal decisions due to evolutionary mismatches (Gidlöf et al, 2020; N. P. Li et al, 2018), given the widely varying conditions across different time epochs of human history. For example, our evolved preference for sweet, fatty, and calorie‐dense foods, while adaptive in times of resource scarcity, may now result in overeating and unhealthy food choices given the ample availability of such foods in many countries, with adverse effects on public health (Ares et al, 2020; Machín et al, 2020; Rojas‐Rivas et al, 2020; Rokholm et al, 2010).…”

Section: The Future Of Ep In Marketing: More Mixed Methods Further Fmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, our evolved preference for sweet, fatty, and calorie-dense foods, while adaptive in times of resource scarcity, may now result in overeating and unhealthy food choices given the ample availability of such foods in many countries, with adverse effects on public health (Ares et al, 2020;Machín et al, 2020;Rojas-Rivas et al, 2020;Rokholm et al, 2010).…”

Section: Dominance Displays Rivalry and Competitive Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolutionary psychology in marketing: Deep, debated, but fancier with fieldwork

Otterbring

2021

Psychology and Marketing

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This guest editorial starts with an introduction of evolutionary psychology (EP) in the marketing domain and delineates some of the building blocks of EP, both generally and when applied to consumer research. While EP is a debated discipline among marketing scholars, with some praising its presence and others perceiving it as patriarchal, politically incorrect, and problematic, a central tenet of this metaframework is a focus on deeprooted, ultimate explanations for human behavior. Marketing scholars have traditionally focused on proximate "how" and "what" questions, which are indeed important to address. However, unlike such proximate questions, EP strives to capture the ultimate "why" reasons behind our purchases and product preferences in terms of which adaptive functions they may have in giving us an evolutionary advantage. Having highlighted and exemplified this proximate-ultimate distinction, I then present each state-of-the-art paper included in this special issue. All special issue articles use a variety of EP arguments and theories to elucidate several consumption-relevant phenomena with implications for marketing theory and practice. In closing, I provide a set of suggestions for future EP-based consumer research, meant to make this field flourish further.

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“…Marketing literature has established numerous state and trait predictors of consumer behavior (Belk, 1975;Haugtvedt et al, 1992;Vinson et al, 1977). With respect to healthy (vs. unhealthy) food choices, the mainstream literature focuses on proximate explanations such as quality expectations, nutrition information, and certification (Grunert, 2002;Nikolova & Inman, 2015;Sigurdsson et al, 2020;Thøgersen et al, 2019), but also in-store product placement (Sigurdsson et al, 2011(Sigurdsson et al, , 2014, individual differences (Otterbring, 2019;Rojas-Rivas et al, 2020), and message framing (Ares et al, 2020;Ares et al, 2021), as well as shopping habits (Machín et al, 2020), visual imagery (Banovic & Otterbring, 2021; OLD MINDS, NEW MARKETPLACES 4 Otterbring & Shams, 2019), and visual attention to food products (Folwarczny et al, 2019;Gidlöf et al, 2021;Wästlund et al, 2018). However, to fully understand human decision-making, it is crucial to also consider ultimate explanations.…”

Section: Analyzing Consumer Food Choices Through An Evolutionary Lensmentioning

confidence: 99%

Old minds, new marketplaces: How evolved psychological mechanisms trigger mismatched food preferences

Folwarczny¹,

Otterbring²,

Sigurðsson³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Principally due to unhealthy food choices that people make in grocery stores, almost half of adults worldwide are overweight and obese. Current food retail practices bear some responsibility for such public health issues. This paper argues that numerous attempts to promote healthy eating fail due to neglecting evolutionarily outdated food acquisition mechanisms. To understand underlying motives behind food choices, we distinguish proximate and ultimate explanations of consumer behavior, which complement the traditional approach to studying consumer behavior. Building on the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis and contrasting ancestral versus present-day foraging environments, we discuss how marketing activities exploit evolutionarily old food preferences and elicit unhealthy food choices. We conclude by explaining how to mitigate this harmful trend by applying the law of law’s leverage to facilitate effective strategies to increase healthy food choices. Notably, we show how evolutionary psychology principles can be used to reconcile competing interests between consumers, retailers, and decision-makers responsible for public health policies.

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The habitual nature of food purchases at the supermarket: Implications for policy making

Cited by 71 publications

References 62 publications

Food environment solutions for childhood obesity in Latin America and among Latinos living in the United States

Food environment solutions for childhood obesity in Latin America and among Latinos living in the United States

Evolutionary psychology in marketing: Deep, debated, but fancier with fieldwork

Old minds, new marketplaces: How evolved psychological mechanisms trigger mismatched food preferences

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