Improving the Diets of Children: Understanding the Decision-Making of Parents, Children, and Food Manufacturers

• Author / Creator

  Allen, Shannon

• The objective of this study is to explore the underlying decision-making that impacts the effectiveness of potential policies that could be implemented by the government in an effort to improve children’s diets and subsequent health outcomes. Under investigation are how food choices could be affected by the following types of policies: 1) a price mechanism at the retail level, 2) a label mechanism similar to one that will soon be found on foods high in sugar, sodium and/or saturated fat in Canada, and 3) a policy targeted at food manufacturers. The price and label mechanisms could influence parents’ or children’s food choices, but likely would not affect all consumers’ choices equally. Some might place more importance on price while others on brand preferences and still others on nutrition information. How children with differing levels of cognitive development would respond to price changes and a traffic light style label when purchasing salty snacks is investigated in the first study. Preferences were elicited via a consequential choice experiment, while cognitive development was assessed through several standardized tasks. Heterogeneity in price sensitivity was established, while responsiveness to the traffic light label appeared somewhat homogenous across the survey sample. How parents with varying characteristics would respond to an explicit, text-based warning label on high-sugar breakfast cereals is the focus of the second study, with data being collected via an online survey including a choice experiment along with measures of nutrition knowledge, purchasing behaviour, and demographic characteristics. Heterogeneity in responsiveness to the warning label was identified both among parents with different characteristics such as nutrition knowledge as well as between brands. In terms of food manufacturers, improving our understanding of their strategic behavior will help to identify what types of policy measures targeted at them could be effective in improving the nutritional quality of their products. The last study in this dissertation examines how breakfast cereal manufacturers choose a combination of price, advertising, and nutritional quality for the products in their portfolio and how these decisions correspond to input prices and consumer awareness of nutrition. There is evidence that firms react both to trends in public nutrition awareness and to each other’s actions, and that overall their product portfolios have been improving in terms of nutritional quality over the past two decades.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • child nutrition
  • food policy
  • food choices

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-qev8-fb31

• License

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