Grant: Project Grant

Food marketing to children is currently a multi-billion dollar industry, targeting young people with commercial messages for unhealthy foods across an ever-expanding range of media and platforms. Food packaging is a particularly powerful form of child-targeted marketing: it strongly influences decision making at the point of sale and influences children's preferences and tastes. Most child-targeted packaged foods, moreover, are of poor nutritional quality. While Health Canada has committed to restrict the marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to children on television and digital platforms, it requires ongoing information on the nature and extent of child-targeted food packaging. Effective monitoring of child-targeted food packaging is necessary to inform potential future regulatory changes. The proposed research fills these research needs. The study will: 1) document the persuasive "power" and nutritional quality of child-targeted packaged foods in Canada (targeting major retail stores as well as speciality stores targeting diverse markets) and 2) use an evidence-based framework to monitor such packaging. Using an innovative tool for data collection (a mobile app called TrackPack), the project will document the food type, brand, packaging techniques (power), nutritional quality, and extent of child-targeted packaged foods in major Canadian cities, identify distinctions in light of store type, and provide rigorous benchmarks for monitoring over time.