Abstract MP19: Academic-community Partnership To Evaluate The Effectiveness Of The Greater Boston Food Bank’s Healthy Pantry Program

Background: Food pantries are a significant nutrition source for food-insecure households. Traffic-light labeling is a new strategy in some pantries to help clients and staff identify healthier food choices. Healthy Pantry Program (HPP) is an online training designed by The Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB) to teach staff of its affiliated pantries how to promote healthier choices by implementing traffic-light labels using Supporting Wellness at Pantries and behavioral nudges, such as placing healthy foods at eye level. Our academic research team partnered with GBFB to evaluate HPP by assessing if food pantries that participated in HPP increased their GBFB purchases of healthier (green and yellow) foods more than matched control pantries.

Methods: We conducted an observational study of 107 food pantries in the GBFB network in eastern Massachusetts, including 10 pantries that completed HPP training and 97 control pantries matched by organizational characteristics and baseline food purchases. Five HPP pantries participated during Wave 1 (Oct 2018-Jan 2019), and 5 participated during Wave 2 (May 2019-Aug 2019). Outcomes were changes in percentage of pantries’ monthly green and yellow purchases from GBFB at 6-month (Waves 1 and 2) and 12-month (Wave 1 only) follow-ups compared to baseline purchases (6 months pre-HPP). We used a difference-in-differences analysis to examine whether HPP pantries increased green-yellow food purchases more than control pantries.

Results: In Wave 1, HPP pantries had small but nonsignificant increases in green-yellow purchases at 6 and 12 months compared to matched controls (Table). In Wave 2, HPP and control pantries had similar increases in green-yellow purchases at 6 months.

Conclusions: An online training implemented by a food bank to improve healthy choices in food pantries did not significantly improve pantries’ purchases of healthier foods. Academic-community organization partnerships to evaluate health promotion initiatives can help guide effective program design and development.